Statecraft

10 September 2026 · analysis

Nobody Told the Councils

A licensing dispute stopped 1,300 Dutch building sites. Britain, Japan and Australia already know how this story ends.

by Jacob Huibers · Lees in het Nederlands →

In the last week of August, two private companies withdrew permission from three others. That is the whole event. It has no villain, no collapsed building, no injured party at the centre of it. Yet by the first week of September the Dutch association of municipalities was telling councils that up to 1,300 construction projects had to stop work immediately, because the assurance covering them was no longer valid.1

The three suspended firms are kwaliteitsborgers, private quality assurers. Since January 2024, they and not the municipality check whether simple new buildings meet Dutch technical requirements. They work with a licensed method, an instrument, owned by a private instrument provider, which admits them to its scheme and polices how they use it. A national admissions body approves the instruments and supervises the providers. The municipality is left holding the enforcement powers and almost nothing else.

Two of those instrument providers suspended three assurers.2 The largest of the three, which serves several hundred projects, says on its own site that the dispute is about the digital connection between its systems and the provider’s registration software, and that it has gone to court.3 Its provider had itself been formally warned by the admissions body for failing to intervene in time against improper use of its instrument.4

A data integration argument between two private companies and a supervisory nudge one level above them silenced 1,300 sites, without fire, cracks or fraud. If you were designing a stress test for a privatised building control regime, you could not have built a gentler one.

Why the councils have no choice

Dutch law closes the loop tightly. At completion, the assurer must declare that it held the provider’s permission to use the instrument. While suspended, it does not. So for any period in which work continued, no valid declaration can be issued afterwards, and without that declaration the building cannot be taken into use.5

Work therefore stops because the paperwork underneath a future declaration has been removed, while the foundations and fire compartmentation are sound. The municipality has no room to weigh anything. It has exactly one instrument, and that instrument is a stop notice.

The law leaves who pays to the contract. In principle the client, though contracts often make the builder responsible for engaging the assurer, in which case the cost lands there.6 The parties bearing the loss are precisely the parties who could not have prevented it.

Assurance is a record of watching

The trade association’s response was to offer capacity: other assurers can take the work over, there are enough of them.7 That is generous, and it counts the wrong thing.

Assurance here is a record of having watched, which cannot be established after the fact. The assurer certifies what it saw during design and construction. A replacement arriving at a closed structure cannot certify reinforcement it never saw, an air barrier it never saw, penetrations through fire compartments it never saw. Substitution is therefore a reconstruction, paid for by opening work up again, or paid for by a declaration weaker than the system pretends.

Capacity is countable. Observation history is not. The offer counts what can be counted.

What is missing is a continuity rule. Regulated professions normally have one: when the practitioner falls away, a successor is appointed and the file transfers with them. In the Dutch scheme the file is tied to the instrument and the instrument to the suspended firm, so in some cases the only way forward is to start the notification again.

Two design faults

The first is that the punishing party sells to the punished party. Assurers pay their instrument provider for the use of the instrument. That relationship runs mild as long as nothing presses from above, and turns absolute the moment something does. The only currency in which a provider can demonstrate enforcement to the national body is suspension, and the national body is pressing: in the first half of 2026 two providers received notice of penalty payments for structural shortcomings in supervision and reporting.8 The cost of the response falls outside the chain entirely, on clients, builders and the people on site. Enforcement pressure applied at the top discharges at the bottom, and nowhere in between is there anything to absorb it.

The second is that nobody has to tell anyone. Municipalities, clients and contractors receive no notification when their assurer is suspended. They are expected to check the register themselves.9 That register was built as market information: may I hire this firm? It is now being used as an enforcement signal: must I stop work today? Those are different products, with different demands on currency, on push versus pull, on addressing. The sector body has asked for a proper notification procedure, and it is right to.10 But procedure understates it. No party in this system has a duty to tell a public authority which of its own files have just been hit.

Four ways to answer the same question

The Netherlands chose from a menu of control options and took the most delegated one. The other options are in operation elsewhere.

Germany appoints people, not firms. Structural and fire safety verification is carried out by Prüfingenieure, engineers granted personal recognition by the supreme building authority of their federal state. The Prüfingenieur is a beliehener Unternehmer, folded into the official procedure and exercising public authority in his own right.11 He checks the calculations and also inspects the work on site by sampling. His fees are set in a state fee schedule, not negotiated. Admission is hard: Brandenburg requires at least ten years of experience with structural verification for complex works, and it obliges him to inform the building authority without delay when defects he has identified are not put right.12

Four differences from the Dutch model, all of them load-bearing in August. Admission attaches to a person, not a company. It comes from the state, not from a commercial licensor. Price is not a competitive variable. And there is a statutory duty to tell the public authority.

France makes the risk carrier the inspector. The loi Spinetta of 4 January 1978 requires every constructor to hold ten-year liability cover and requires the client, before work starts, to take out dommages-ouvrage insurance covering defects that affect structural soundness or render the building unfit for its purpose for ten years after handover.13 The same act put technical control on a statutory footing, carried out by firms approved by the state for renewable five-year terms, mandatory for defined categories and increasingly demanded by insurers as a condition of cover.14

This answers the hardest question directly: the insurer carries the defect that surfaces in eight years. And because the insurer carries it, the insurer wants to know what happened on site. The inspector then works for the party holding the risk.

England is walking it back. England introduced approved inspectors alongside local authority building control in 1984 and has been reversing since Grenfell. Since April 2024 the Building Safety Regulator is itself the building control authority for all higher-risk buildings, which removes the developer’s ability to appoint a private inspector for that category; approved inspectors have become registered building control approvers, and individual inspectors must now register personally.15 In December 2025 the government set out a prospectus for a single regulator covering buildings, construction products and the professions, following the Grenfell Inquiry’s second-phase recommendation.16 The Building Control Independent Panel put the principle plainly in May 2026: building control is a public interest function, not a commercial service.17

England is not alone in that direction of travel. Japan opened building confirmation to designated private bodies in 1998; in 2005 it emerged that an engineer had falsified earthquake resistance calculations for dozens of buildings, undetected by the private bodies and by several local authorities, and he said openly that he had counted on the checking being loose.18 Australia reached the same place through Opal Tower and the cladding crisis, commissioned the Building Confidence review with its 24 recommendations in 2018,19 and was still legislating in June 2026 to make private certifiers answerable after they leave the industry, because surrendering a registration had been enough to escape sanction.20

Three countries, one movement, and the same four corrections each time: register individuals and not only firms; oblige someone to tell the public authority; provide for what happens when the inspector falls away; and keep a public fallback for the highest-risk work.

The Netherlands currently has none of the four fully in place. August was the first time the third one was missed in public.

What actually broke, historically

It is tempting to read this as deregulation gone wrong, and to leave it there. The more useful reading is about sequence.

Every modern building control regime is an attempt to rebuild, artificially, something that industrialisation dismantled: the coincidence of three roles in one party. Whoever builds, whoever carries the reputation, and whoever pays when it goes wrong. In a town with one builder those were the same person, and reputation worked as a sanction, because he sold to the person who would live in the house, he stayed in the town, and the defect showed up while he was still trading.

Three separate developments broke that. Speculative building put a developer between builder and occupant, and the developer’s interest ends at the sale. Technical complexity pushed the failure horizon out beyond the reputational one: a settling façade is visible in five years, a badly executed fire penetration is visible when it matters and not before. And the division of labour spread the work across ten subcontractors, none of whom sees the whole.

Reputation can only punish what surfaces while the party to be punished still exists. That is the entire argument for public building control, and it is the argument that every privatisation of building control has to answer.

Germany answers it by making the inspector personally answerable under public law. France answers it by requiring a solvent carrier that outlives the builder’s company. England answers it, for the buildings where the consequence is worst, by taking the function back.

The Dutch answer is a declaration at one moment in time, issued by a party paid by the party it inspects, whose authority to issue it depends on a private licensor. That is a document at a point, not assurance over a period. It is a design in which the question “who is still there and answerable when the defect appears?” was never asked, and in August it turned out the system could not even answer the easier version: who is still there when the inspector goes.

Nothing fell down. Nobody was hurt. The bill arrived as three weeks of stopped work and an argument about who pays for it. That is the cheapest warning this design will ever issue.

My book De Richting van de Beweging: Interim-Management in de Publieke Sector (manuscript in preparation) treats institutional continuity as the primary test of any reform: what is left standing once nobody is watching. The Dutch assurance act is an instructive example, because it has assurance in its name and does not organise it in its design.

Jacob Huibers is an interim manager with more than twenty years of experience in the Dutch public sector. He has worked as cluster manager, cluster director and quartermaster at municipalities ranging from fifty thousand to over two hundred thousand inhabitants, and at inter-municipal collaborative bodies across the social and physical domains. Statecraft is his platform for strategic reflection on public-sector execution, pillar IV of House of Viridian.

Responses and counter-arguments via Statecraft.nl.

Footnotes

  1. Association of Netherlands Municipalities (VNG), guidance to councils, 1 September 2026. ↩

  2. Toelatingsorganisatie Kwaliteitsborging Bouw (TloKB), register of suspended quality assurers and accompanying notice, 2 September 2026. The suspensions run from 24 August, 25 August and 7 September 2026 respectively. ↩

  3. Statement by Bureau Kwaliteitsborging B.V., Amersfoort, September 2026, reported in Aannemer. ↩

  4. TloKB, formal warning to instrument provider Apexion, 28 August 2026. ↩

  5. Housing Act (Woningwet) art. 7ac(2), in conjunction with Besluit bouwwerken leefomgeving art. 2.21 and Besluit kwaliteit leefomgeving art. 3.86(2)(a). ↩

  6. Bouwend Nederland, guidance to members, September 2026. ↩

  7. Vereniging KwaliteitsBorging Nederland (VKBN), reported by NU.nl, 3 September 2026. ↩

  8. TloKB half-year report, first half of 2026. ↩

  9. VKBN, reported by NU.nl, 3 September 2026. ↩

  10. Idem. ↩

  11. Bundesvereinigung der Prüfingenieure für Bautechnik, description of the role and its statutory basis in the Landesbauordnungen and Bauprüfverordnungen. ↩

  12. Brandenburgische Bautechnische Prüfungsverordnung (BbgBauPrüfV). ↩

  13. Loi n°78-12 of 4 January 1978, codified at Code civil arts. 1792 et seq. and Code des assurances arts. L241-1 et seq. ↩

  14. Code de la construction et de l’habitation art. L125-3. ↩

  15. Building Safety Act 2022; transfer of approved inspectors to registered building control approvers from 6 April 2024; BSR as building control authority for higher-risk buildings. ↩

  16. Government prospectus for a single construction regulator, December 2025, following Grenfell Tower Inquiry Phase 2 (September 2024). ↩

  17. Building Control Independent Panel report, May 2026. ↩

  18. Amendment of the Building Standards Law, 1998; the structural calculation falsification case, November 2005. ↩

  19. P. Shergold and B. Weir, Building Confidence, Building Ministers’ Forum, 2018. ↩

  20. New South Wales, building, property and conveyancing bill, June 2026. ↩