The Building Warrant of Fitness

What it is

A Building Warrant of Fitness is a statement, signed by the building’s owner or their agent, that the inspection, maintenance and reporting procedures set out in the building’s compliance schedule have been fully complied with over the previous 12 months.

It is not an inspection. It is a declaration, supported by certificates from the people who did the inspecting.

Who issues what

This is where most of the confusion lives, and it is worth being exact:

1. The council — issues the compliance schedule. This lists the specified systems in the building, the performance standards for each, and the procedures required to keep them performing.
2. The IQP — issues a Form 12A for each specified system, certifying that those procedures were fully complied with.
3. The owner, or an agent acting for them — signs the Form 12, the warrant itself, attaches all the Form 12As, and supplies it to the territorial authority. Form 12 carries an agent block for precisely this, and we supply it on behalf of the owners we act for.

So when someone says “the council issues our warrant”, they have it backwards. The council receives it. The owner issues it — or an agent appointed by the owner does, which is what we do for most of the buildings we look after.

One distinction is worth keeping straight, because it protects you: an agent can do all of the work and sign and supply the warrant, but the statutory duty under section 108 stays with the owner. Appointing an agent is how the job gets done properly; it is not a way to hand the liability to somebody else, and any agent telling you otherwise is selling you something that does not exist.

When it is due

The warrant must “be supplied on each anniversary of the issue of the compliance schedule” — Building Act 2004, s108(3)(a).

Read that carefully, because it is not what most people assume:

• It is not the calendar year.
• It is not the anniversary of your last warrant.
• It is the anniversary of the day the compliance schedule was originally issued.

Amending a compliance schedule part-way through a year does not move the date. Buying the building does not move it either.

What has to be attached

Under s108(3), the warrant must have attached to it all certificates from independently qualified persons which, considered together, certify that every procedure in the compliance schedule has been fully complied with over the previous 12 months. It must also carry any IQP recommendation that the schedule itself should be amended.

“Considered together” is the phrase that causes trouble. One missing system means the set is incomplete, and an incomplete set is not a valid warrant — however good the other eleven certificates are.

Displaying it

Section 108(4) requires a copy to be publicly displayed in a place in the building to which users have ready access. In practice we handle the display copy along with everything else. Usually the lobby. If the compliance schedule relates only to a cable car, the copy is displayed in or near the cable car.

Keeping the records

Section 110 requires annual written reports, signed by each person who carried out the procedures, kept together with the compliance schedule for two years and produced on request to the territorial authority or anyone else with a statutory right to inspect the building. The warrant must also show where those records are kept. Where we act as agent we hold and maintain that record set for you.

Where it usually goes wrong

Not in the fire systems. In the calendar.

A warrant is assembled from every trade on the schedule, and the failure mode is almost always the same: one contractor has not been back, their report is outstanding, the anniversary arrives, and the set is incomplete. Nobody was holding all of it at once.

That is the entire argument for having one organisation responsible for the whole schedule rather than the largest slice of it — which is what we do.