I’m curious how this works in the UK. With the Building Safety Act and the focus on the Golden Thread of information, is the process tighter over there?
Because in the US the submittal process is a nightmare, lots of copy and pasting, back-and-forth, and it just seems like the whole thing is so inefficient due to misaligned incentive.
Oh, and the manual work and all that, of course.
Do you guys have the same issue where Main Contractors just forward paperwork without looking at it, or is the UK workflow more streamlined? Just trying to figure out if this is a global misery or if we’re just doing it wrong across the pond.
Update: seems like in UK you don't use the word "submittal", I apologize – it's when the contractor sends product data/shop drawings to the designers / architects for review before ordering, lots of back and forth and coordination here.
10 comments
As the leading UK “ask” subreddit, we welcome questions from all users and countries; sometimes people who ask questions might not appreciate or understand the nuance of British life or culture, and as a result some questions can come across in a different way than intended.
We understand that when faced with these questions, our users may take the opportunity to demonstrate their wit, dry humour, and sarcasm – unfortunately, this also tends to go over the heads of misunderstood question-askers and can make our subreddit seem hostile to users from other countries who are often just curious about our land.
**Please can you help prevent our subreddit from becoming an Anti-American echo chamber?** If you disagree with any points raised by OP, or OP discusses common tropes or myths about the UK, please refrain from any brash, aggressive, or sarcastic responses and do your best to engage OP in a civil discussion, with the aim to educate and expand their understanding.
If you feel this (or any other post) is a troll post, *don’t feed the troll*, just hit report and let the mods deal with it.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskUK) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I have no idea what you are talking about.
I was about to comment ‘submission*’, but then I bothered to check in the dictionary and submittal is actually a word!
Truly, every day is a school day.
To answer the question, the planning process in the UK is exhaustive. There are many opportunities for people to object to any works you get done and these objections are frequently upheld.
It’s a good thing in theory, however with so many legal hoops to jump through development takes longer and is more expensive than most countries.
Case in point: HS2. It’s the most expensive railway in the world by a large margin and will take nearly 20 years to complete. It’s a farce.
Our equivalents are the Planning Permission which is the overall approval to build or make changes over a certain level of complexity/size/few other conditions to anything on a given plot, building control inspectors (unsure on exact name), who inspect to make sure the build is in line with not just the Planning Permission but also laws and regulations (“up to code” as you’d say), and then there’s obviously the laws and regulations which you’re expected to follow.
I’m not familiar enough with the above, or your systems, to map between the two.
But getting Planning Permission can be a nightmare of backwards and forwards or it can be sending off statutory documents and getting a straightforward approval, depending on what you’re doing, where you live, and whether you forgot to include something. Inspectors can result in you having to make changes or having your BP revoked and you having to re-submit or even demolish/be unable to inhabit.
You might want to look on YouTube for episodes of Kevin Macleod / Grand Designs. Not all of them dive into the planning side of things but on builds that have problems, they sometimes include sections covering the issues and how they fixed it so the build could continue.
I work in fire engineering so don’t get involved with approvals myself but yes, the industry experiences are prolonged.
The BSR is famously under staffed and not resourced with the correct people. They will need to sub contract out to the 3rd parties for peer review and just to take on the workload.
At planning, it’s a similar but more tired story of understaffed councils.
My main grievance at the minute is to need to individually demonstrate competency for each project. Regardless of whether the lead engineer is Chartered (PE licences is what you guys use), you still need to provide a specific report including case studies showing that you’re capable.
Look up HS2, and it might partially answer your question (if I’m understanding it correctly).
Although I can’t say if our planning nightmares are caused by the same issues, building anything in the UK can be a huge headache.
I think we’d call it “planning”, and there’s a signing off process that happens in advance known “planning permission” and yes it’s a drawn-out process very often.
That sounds a bit vague but if someone said they were waiting for planning permission to finalise to a Brit they’d know what you were talking about.
The introduction of the BSR after grenfell has caused a bit of an industry backlog as many projects arent getting through their gateway 2 submissions on the first try. Teething troubles with a new regulatory body, but I understand they have made significant improvements to the BSR gateway 2 process so we’re expecting things to improve over 2026 with respect to this.
There are often issues where theres a disconnect in knowledge of design intent/technical knowledge between different parties on the project. I work for a company that does business all over the world in the construction industry & these communication challenges are global. Its just the way the industry seems to work. It doesnt help that projects often have very optimistic timescales and budgets that do not reflect the level of amenity the design team/client wants to provide to end users. Contractors & suppliers underbidding each other is a race to the bottom, but unfortunately thats just capitalism :/
I work in lighting design so my requirements for shop drawings are very simple, so if they come back wrong I stamp “C – what were you drinking? Try again”
However, BIM cuts down coordination time massively from months to weeks.
America doesn’t use BIM enough it seems
I am a consultant on complex infrastructure in the UK, and yes the contractor does usually produce technical submittals and then either the one of the Client’s engineering teams, one of the Contractors engineering teams or an outsourced Consulting firm will review them against the original design intent.
My experiences in this have varied: it has been wonderfully smooth where we didn’t have much to do and just ticked off the submittals, but more often it’s a nightmare where product obsolescence / catalogue refreshes has essentially meant we are reselecting and redesigning systems parallel to construction.
IIRC the technical submittal process is mentioned in BSRIA BG 6 as a Stage 5 activity, so surprised other commenters aren’t familiar (granted there’s more than one framework!). I will have to check when I’m back at my desk