About Us

Introduction

We carry out the duties of the Scottish Ministers set out in the Building (Scotland) Act 2003. The Act gave Ministers the power to make building regulations to

secure the health, safety, welfare and convenience of persons in and about buildings and others who may be affected by buildings or matters connected with buildings
further the conservation of fuel and power
further the achievement of sustainable development.

The Act introduced the new Scottish building standards system, which started on 1st May 2005. The system is designed to protect the public interest in the design, construction, conversion and demolition of buildings. Before work begins, plans must be ‘verified’ as meeting the standards set in the Scottish building regulations.

The functions of the division are:

to prepare the building regulations and write guidance on how to meet the regulations
to provide views on compliance to help verifiers make decisions
to grant relaxations of the regulations in exceptional cases
to maintain a register of Approved Certifiers
to monitor and audit the certification system
to monitor and audit the performance of verifiers

SBS Corporate Plan 2006-09 is the second corporate plan of the Division.

Other documents which you may find useful are:

SBS Framework Document (HTML Version) (PDF Version, 229kB)
Guidelines on fees to be charged for functions undertaken by the SBS on behalf of Scottish Ministers (From 1 May 2006) PDF