Restricted Building Work
Restricted Building Work (RBW) is design and building work that is critical to make a home structurally sound and weathertight. This work can only be carried out or supervised by a Licensed Building Practitioner (LBP).
LBP licence classes cover
- design
- carpentry
- roofing
- external plastering
- bricklaying or blocklaying
- foundations
- site.
Some of the trade classes can overlap, allowing an LBP to carry out or supervise more than one class of work. There are also professionals and trades who are automatically treated as LBPs, such as
- registered architects and chartered professional engineers (CPEng) treated as design LBPs
- licensed or certified plumbers or gasfitters treated as licensed for certain work.
You can search for an LBP on the LBP website.
LBPs carrying out restricted building work must supply you with either a
- Certificate of Design Work (COW) – to submit with your consent application, or
- Record of Work (ROW) – to provide with your application for a code compliance certificate at the end of the project.
They can’t contract out of this obligation - these are a legal requirement.
These records
- provide assurance that the work covered in them are completed or supervised by a competent person, and
- make it clear who has accountability for the work carried out.
Where more than one LBP is involved with the design of your building work then
- the supervising LBP is responsible for the design and the COW where the work is under supervision of another LBP
- each LBP needs to supply a COW for their part of the design that is restricted building work.
You are responsible for including all COWs and ROWs for all restricted building work on your project.