Avoidable rework now accounts for around 11% of total UK construction project costs. That figure should stop every commercial director in their tracks. Yet behind it sits a problem the industry still treats as routine: critical project decisions get made over mobile phone chats, are buried in personal inboxes or written into a notebook that never makes it onto the project record. Rob Norton, UK Director at PlanRadar, writes the following article…
The cost sits firmly in the commercial and legal column. PlanRadar’s latest research reveals that around eight in ten construction professionals admit at least half of their documentation lives across unconsolidated communication channels like these. Information fragmentation like this has created a massive administrative drain for site teams, forcing them to spend over 11 hours every single work week on manual paperwork and tracking down hidden project histories. At a minimum, it erases a full working day from their schedules.
The WhatsApp liability
When a site instruction gets issued over a private message, it disappears from the project record. A product substitution agreed verbally on site, yet never logged, breaks the specification trail. And, when a design clarification happens during a site walk but never gets logged, it too disappears. Multiply instances like these across a tier 1 project with hundreds of operatives, and the gap between what was agreed and what can be evidenced becomes vast.
Under the Building Safety Act, that gap is now a regulatory exposure. The Golden Thread demands a continuous, accurate and accessible record of decisions across a building’s lifecycle. Information held in someone’s chat history fails to meet the standard.
Five rules for structured communication
1. Run one hub per project: Centralise RFIs, instructions, photographs and approvals in a single shared record. Give every party with a stake in the outcome access to the hub.
2. Tie every entry to context: Link each comment, image and instruction to a specific location, plan or task. If it cannot be tagged to the work, it does not belong on the record.
3. Assign every action: Give each decision an owner, a deadline and a visible status. Close the loop before the next meeting.
4. Build for the jobsite: Use tools that are designed to work on a phone, in poor signal, in gloves and in the rain. The lesson here: if capture is hard, it does not happen.
5. Be ‘audit-ready’ from day one: Treat every record as evidence – something that a regulator, insurer or lawyer will review. Keep it time-stamped, centralised and accessible.
From chat history to compliance
Digital platforms now provide the foundation for ensuring compliance in construction. The value of platforms follows from the logical workflow they enforce: consistent capture, traceable decisions and a defensible audit trail that holds up under regulatory scrutiny.
For specifiers, contractors and manufacturers preparing for the future, the message is straightforward: informal communication now carries a price tag the Building Safety Act has made impossible to ignore.
The industry has the tools. It needs the discipline to use them consistently. Construction leaders should mandate structured digital workflows on every project, enforce them through the supply chain and treat any decision made outside the system as a defect. That is how margins, compliance and reputation get protected.
Following the new Fire Safety (Residential Evacuation Plans) Regulations, which came into force on 6 April, Rob shared commentary on the implications of the new requirements for building managers on Buildingtalk – this can be read here. Rob is a passionate advocate for digital transformation in construction. He specialises in helping construction project teams and organisations elevate quality, fire safety and operational efficiency through technology adoption, with particular expertise in Golden Thread compliance and full construction lifecycle management.
