Building Advice: What to know about the new register of competent builders
The register is expected to start with commercial and large-scale residential builders before trickling down to cover smaller firms in the industry. Picture: iStock
If you’re looking for a builder or skilled trade, it’s comforting to know that the industry’s regulation is improving exponentially from this year.
Still, it’s a work in progress, and just like that achingly lovely 40-square-metre extension, it’s going to take time. As a result of a 2022 Act (The Regulation of Providers of Building Works and Miscellaneous Provisions Act), a new statutory register is in development, making it mandatory for all providers of building works to be registered.
The Construction Industry Register of Ireland(CIRI) will be a published, online register of competent builders, contractors, specialist sub-contractors and trades. The Construction Industry Federation of Ireland expect it to be “recognised as the primary online resource used by consumers in the public and private procurement of building construction services.” If your works are covered by the building regulations - CIRI registration by your builder, sub-contractors and trades, will ultimately be a legal requirement.
The draft code for joining CIRI required companies to:
- Understand and comply with all applicable legislation and regulations.
- Employ management expertise to facilitate satisfactory progression of contracts.
- Conduct all business in an honest, ethical and fair manner.
- Respect and address legitimate concerns of work undertaken.
- Be able to specify, or arrange to undertake, appropriate building techniques.
- Undertake high-quality building works in accordance with the plans, specifications, scope of works and contracts, in compliance with building regulations.
- Maintain appropriate tax clearances.
- Adhere to safe working practices in accordance with legislation and not to participate in trading of illegally sourced materials.
In the coming year, the dedicated register managed by the Construction Industry Federation of Ireland’s CIRI will go live, with divisions of labour steadily covering the various tranches of the building industry from contractors to trades. It’s something the CIF have been working on for over ten years as a means to deliver increased confidence in an industry often maligned over the escapades of a handful of rogue operators. Moving from the voluntary CIF register, the mandatory CIRI register will be the standard tool for finding competent contractors and skilled individuals to completely handle your house build or renovation or to offer a quote for any individual project needing experience and/or certified skills.
Sarah Ingle, Registrar of CIRI explains, “CIRI registrants are required to demonstrate their eligibility for registration in the form of knowledge, skill and expertise relating to competence requirements assigned for each division of the register. CIRI brings providers of building works in line with other practitioners in the built environment, including electrical contractors, gas installers, engineers, architects and surveyors. The overall aim of the register is to further develop and promote within the Irish building industry, a culture of competence, compliance, good business practice and continuing professional development.”
Right now, the register is expected to start with commercial and large-scale residential builders before trickling down to cover smaller firms in the industry. With just 800 firms on the voluntary register at present, how long will compiling the new CIRI register take? Sarah continues, “The full register will be developed over a number of years as new divisions are introduced.”
Along with protecting themselves from liability with proper insurance, serious firms and individuals will consider the overhead or joining CIRI as just the price of doing business, but for small two or three-person companies, joining is a considerable spend. Will this be passed on to clients? Every division of builder or trade will have to supply ongoing documentary proof to show they are a proper registered company, are tax compliant, have all necessary and appropriately scaled insurance in place, and proof of qualification, certification and training where appropriate. The mechanism for enforcing stipulations for being on the CIRI register is also in development and are expected to be serious. CIRI has, in part at least, been prompted by the pyrite and mica scandals and high-profile tragedies concerning fire safety, which shook the industry Europe-wide.
Not being on any industry register does not automatically make someone a villainous fool, and being on a register does not necessarily mean someone is a dote to deal with, with a blameless record. Is CIRI likely to be an effective crackdown on cowboys? It’s certainly going to make their life more complicated as we move towards mandatory certification for all building work covered by the building regulations. Householders will still slip cash to trades for larger and smaller jobs as they always have – that’s going to be hard to stamp out with a governmental boot. Still, when building, renovating or extensively extending a home, the CIRI register will be key. If the contractor has been in court in the past, their culpability will have been weighed by the registering authority before allowing them to join CIRI.
For most builders, it’s in their interest to register with CIRI as soon as their division goes live. This showcases their professional credentials to other industry professionals and new clients in particular. Good builders are able to not just carry out the work to a price within a set time frame but will manage a site and various sub-contractors with equal skill. You should be looking for tax-compliant individuals with full insurance in place, and registered or not, we need to do the same work to find the right people for the project. Without local knowledge, the CIRI register will be a good start if your architect or engineer doesn’t favour a particular team. CIRI will only tell us so much, and the power to protect ourselves from disasters on site remains in a properly composed, binding contract above all. Common issues like project over-runs and snagging to ensure a good standard will still be your problem (handled by your project manager, engineer or architect in many cases). It’s important do background checks on your builder and to know where they intend to source the materials needed.
CIRI will not be your first port of call for dispute resolution, but it will help. If you have no contract or a pencilled chat on the back of a cigarette packet – things could go horribly, horribly wrong. Sarah Ingle says, “When the full register becomes available, it will be an excellent resource for public and private consumers in choosing a provider of building works to undertake their project. The CIF always encourages those engaging builders to have a contract in place before the work commences.”
Reputable builders were caught by poor-quality aggregates just as unregistered companies were – it’s not a binary good-guy/bad-guy situation. Some firms simply bought cheaper products. For most of us, our homes are the biggest financial investment of our lives, and we should proceed within intelligent parameters, whether putting in solar panels or a whole new extension. Being on the CIRI register doesn’t mean your company cannot fold, but what they will have is a good level of insurance, and it does signal that they are presenting themselves right out in the open as legitimate professionals.
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