The Building Commission conducted a survey of home owners, local governments and builders in February and March 2015 to review the requirement for owners to sign a building permit application form. These stakeholders were surveyed on:

• Their awareness of the current exemption;
• The requirement for owners to give consent to a building permit application form being submitted to the local government;
• Any positive outcomes or benefits of the current exemption; and 
• Any negative outcomes or problems of the current exemption. 
• 486 respondents participated in the survey. Of these, 77% of home owners, 86% of local governments and 65% of builders agreed that owners should give consent to a building permit application before it is submitted to the permit authority.

A discussion paper has been prepared based on the survey results to seek input from stakeholders on the mechanisms that can be used to obtain the consent of owners. The Building Commission does not wish to limit the scope for options. However, to facilitate discussion, four options have been identified. These options are presented in section 5 of the discussion paper.

View the Discussion paper - Requirement for owners to give consent to a building permit application form. 

Submissions are invited from home owners, local governments, builders and other interested parties on the options contained in the discussion paper.

Submissions can be made online at www.surveymonkey.com/r/ownerconsent.

Name and contact details must be supplied with each submission.

Please submit your response by 5pm, 9 June 2015.

Information provided may become public

After this consultation period concludes, all responses received may be publicly available on the Department of Commerce website. Please note that because your feedback forms part of a public consultation process, the Government may quote from your comments in future publications. If you prefer your name to remain confidential, please indicate that in your submission. As submissions made in response to this paper will be subject to freedom of information requests, please do not include any personal or confidential information that you do not wish to become available to the public.

How your input will be used

The information gathered from this consultation will be taken into account when finalising the submission to the Minister for Commerce seeking approval to make the relevant amendments. Your input is crucial as it will assist in identifying issues of concern and will help in the formulation of the advice.

Further information

For further information, please contact one of the officers on the Owner Consent Review Team.

Phone: 08 6251 1440 or  08 6251 1368
Email: ownerconsent@commerce.wa.gov.au