Glasgow’s building standards service handled warrant applications representing £983 million of construction during 2025–26, but remained below national targets for two of the principal measures governing how quickly applications are dealt with. The council says persistent vacancies and staff turnover are part of the problem.
Almost £1 billion of proposed building work passed through Glasgow’s building warrant system last year while the council service responsible for checking it continued to fall short of national response-time targets.
Figures being presented to Glasgow City Council’s Economy, Housing, Transport and Regeneration City Policy Committee on Tuesday show that the Building Standards service received 2,744 building warrant applications during 2025–26.
Those applications represented work valued at £983 million.
During the same financial year, the service issued 3,898 Completion Certificate Acceptances, the formal stage through which completed building work is accepted within Scotland’s building standards system.
The council is careful to say that those figures are not themselves measures of performance. They illustrate the volume and economic value of construction activity being handled by the service.
The performance figures that follow are rather less comfortable.
Scottish local authorities are measured against a national target requiring 95 per cent of first responses to building warrant applications to be issued within 20 working days.
Glasgow achieved between 81 and 88 per cent during the four quarters of 2025–26.
Its performance was rated Amber during the first quarter and Red during the remaining three quarters. Under the performance system used during the year, performance of 85 per cent or above fell within the Amber range, while anything below that threshold was Red.
A second target requires 90 per cent of building warrants and amendments to be issued within ten working days once the verifier has received all satisfactory information needed to decide the application.
Glasgow achieved between 73 and 79 per cent.
It remained Red against that measure throughout the year.
The distinction between the two targets is worth making. The first measures how quickly an applicant receives an initial response. The second begins only after the council has all of the satisfactory information it requires. In other words, the latter is intended to measure the council’s processing time once an application is effectively ready for determination, rather than delays caused by applicants supplying incomplete material.
The council describes 2025–26 as another “very challenging” year from a performance perspective and says the service has had limited success filling existing vacancies alongside normal staff turnover. It adds that recruitment difficulty is part of a wider national problem rather than one confined to Glasgow.
Following the Grenfell Tower fire and wider concerns about construction quality, building control throughout Scotland has been moving towards greater scrutiny rather than less. Glasgow’s report specifically identifies high-risk buildings — including high-rise residential and commercial developments, schools, hospitals and care homes — as an increasing focus for the service.
As Scotland’s largest city, Glasgow says it receives a greater proportion of applications involving developments of that kind.
It is also beginning to receive building warrant enquiries and applications for new tall buildings whose height can take them beyond limits contained within existing fire-safety guidance. Scottish Ministers have introduced enhanced compliance-plan guidance for inspections of high-risk developments ahead of planned legislative changes in 2027.
The result is a service being asked simultaneously to process a large construction economy, recruit scarce professional staff and perform increasingly detailed verification of some of the most technically demanding buildings in Scotland.
Under the Building (Scotland) Act 2003, Scotland’s 32 local authorities are appointed by Scottish Ministers as verifiers for their respective areas. Their building standards teams independently check proposed work against building regulations before granting warrants and assess compliance before accepting completion certificates.
Glasgow’s current appointment as a verifier runs from May 2023 until April 2029, and continued appointment requires authorities to operate within a performance framework set by Scottish Ministers.
The city’s Building Standards and Public Safety service also carries responsibilities beyond processing warrants. These include dangerous buildings, reports of unauthorised work, safety at sports grounds and work connected with temporary raised structures, liquor licensing and public entertainment licensing.
Glasgow says eight of the ten key performance outcomes and associated targets against which it was assessed were being met.
Fee income covered the cost of verification. At least 75 per cent of key processes were being handled electronically. The required customer charter and performance information were being published, while responses to Scottish Government verifier-performance enquiries were meeting their target.
The council also reports an annual customer satisfaction score of 8.6, above a national average of 8.2.
Even there, however, officers add an appropriate warning: the customer satisfaction result is based on a small number of returns and therefore needs to be treated cautiously.
There is also a small inconsistency within the committee report itself. It states that eight of ten assessed outcomes and associated targets are being met, which would leave two outstanding. The following section refers to “the remaining three criteria” but then lists only the two response-time measures. The figures provided in the report therefore support two identified areas of below-target performance rather than three.
The national response to capacity problems has already begun to affect what applicants pay.
Scottish Ministers introduced the first of a planned three years of building warrant fee increases in April 2024. A further increase followed in April 2025. The Scottish Government said the additional income was intended to allow verifiers to invest in staffing and strengthen building standards services.
For Glasgow, an exercise examining the workforce required to undertake the intended level of verification inspection identified the need for approximately 9.5 additional posts.
The council says it began recruiting for those additional positions during 2025. The exercise is intended not simply to increase immediate capacity but to address the age profile of the workforce and succession planning as experienced staff leave the profession.
The council reports that 80 per cent of its verification staff have completed the first stage of Scotland’s developing Professional Competency Framework, with all staff expected to complete it by the end of the year. A separate peer-review stage is also under way.
Sources
Glasgow City Council — Building Standards Annual Performance Report 2025–26, Economy, Housing, Transport and Regeneration City Policy Committee, 18 August 2026
https://onlineservices.glasgow.gov.uk/councillorsandcommittees/viewSelectedDocument.asp?c=P62AFQDNUTZLDX2UDX
Scottish Government — Building Standards Performance Framework for Verifiers
https://www.gov.scot/publications/building-standards-performance-framework-verifiers/
Scottish Government — Building Standards Performance Framework for Verifiers, effective from 1 April 2026
https://www.gov.scot/publications/building-standards-performance-framework-verifiers-1-april-2026/
Scottish Government — Building warrant fees: consultation outcome report
https://www.gov.scot/publications/building-warrant-fees-consultation-outcome-report/
Scottish Government — The Building (Fees) (Scotland) Amendment Regulations 2025: Business and Regulatory Impact Assessment
https://www.gov.scot/publications/building-fees-scotland-amendment-regulations-2025-business-regulatory-impact-assessment/
Scottish Government — Building standards
https://www.gov.scot/policies/building-standards/
