What you are owed in as-built drawings and handover information on a South African job is worth being precise about, because it is neither nothing nor a published standard. The National Building Regulations require competent persons to certify the systems they were appointed for to the local authority at completion, and the occupancy certificate turns on those certificates arriving. If you are on an unamended JBCC Principal Building Agreement you are owed more than that. Clause 12.2.19 of edition 6.2 obliges the contractor to hand three things to the principal agent on achieving practical completion. The three are all the information needed to prepare the as-built documentation, the applicable statutory and regulatory approval certificates, and the operating and instruction manuals.
What no published instrument sets is what any of that has to contain. The obligation has a hook and no content, and the content is where the argument happens.
Britain has been consulting on changing that, for Britain. The draft is worth reading here for one reason. It names the minimum content that a client should get at the end of any project, and naming it is the part nobody in this market has done.
What is actually out for comment
The Construction Leadership Council and BIM in Asset Management have published draft guidance on as-built and handover information requirements, and Construction Manager reported on 3 September that the industry has six weeks to respond. Responses are due by noon on 16 October 2026.
The document sets out to do four things. Give a clear, practical definition of what as-built information and the handover pack are. Set out the minimum content that should be provided at the end of any project. Describe how the level of detail and accuracy should be decided, so that it matches the risk and the needs of different clients and building operators. Help clients specify what to require in contracts, and help project teams plan how to deliver it.
The scope is deliberately wide. All building work subject to the building regulations, from small domestic projects to large complex buildings. New build and work on existing buildings. All procurement routes.
The drafters are blunt about why it was needed. The terms as-built, O&M manuals and handover information are read differently by different members of the same project team, the document says. What gets delivered is, in its words, "frequently incomplete, out of date, and/or untrustworthy".
The line that does the work
One sentence in the draft is worth the whole document. Treating building information as a planned project output, it says, rather than an activity undertaken at project completion, is very likely to improve the quality, consistency and long-term value of what gets delivered.
That is the difference between a handover pack that exists and one that is assembled by a site agent in the last week of a job from whatever is in the container. Anthony Taylor, who chaired the drafting group, describes the aim as getting the right information to the right person at the right time.
Note what the guidance is careful to say it is not. It is not a formal standard and it is not a contractual document. It carries no legal force in Britain and none whatsoever here.
What blocks it in South Africa
Three things, and they are worth being honest about.
The first is that our equivalent trigger is different. The guidance hangs off building work subject to the building regulations. Our version of that is the National Building Regulations and Building Standards Act 103 of 1977, itself under amendment. The Amendment Bill was gazetted as General Notice 4006 of 2026 in Government Gazette 54941 on 3 July 2026, and its 60-day comment period has since closed. Nothing in that notice addresses handover information, and the moment to have asked for it has passed.
The second is contractual, and it is a gap in the content rather than in the obligation. JBCC clause 12.2.19 tells the contractor to hand over the information for the as-built documentation and the operating manuals, and it hands them to your principal agent rather than to you. It does not say what an as-built drawing set is, how current it has to be, or what format it arrives in. Guarantees and product warranties sit in a separate clause, 12.2.20, and are only ceded to you when the certificate of final completion is issued. So the specification and the contract data are still doing all the real work.
NEC is more explicit about being silent: neither NEC3 nor NEC4 lists handover content itself, leaving it entirely to the Works Information under NEC3 or the Scope under NEC4. All of those are drafted long before anyone has thought about who will operate the building in year eight. So the enforceable obligation exists and the specification behind it usually does not. If the content was not specified, it was not priced. A contractor who did not price it will hand you a compliant-looking box of paper at practical completion, and you will struggle to argue it falls short.
The third is the one the guidance quietly assumes away. It is written for a client with an asset information system to receive the information into. Most South African owners have a storeroom, and a handover pack that arrives as a stack of unindexed lever-arch files in a storeroom is functionally the same as no handover pack at all.
What should a handover pack contain?
A handover pack should contain six things, and we sign nothing off without them. Arabella takes handover on a client's behalf, so we see what actually arrives rather than what was promised.
- As-built drawings that match the building rather than the tender set, issued in a format the client can open in five years
- Certificates of compliance for every installation that carries its own regime, with the issuer's registration number on each
- Operating and maintenance manuals for every item of plant, with the model and serial number recorded
- The guarantee schedule, with start dates rather than durations
- Commissioning records and test results
- A single asset register listing what is in the building, where it is, and who installed it
That list is our own practice, not a standard. It is also short enough to put in a contract, which is the whole point of writing it down.
Pieces on compliance certificates and defects sit alongside this one in insights, and what handover looks like from the client side is set out on the client page.
On Monday
Take the last job you completed and open the file. Establish whether you have as-built drawings that match the building, and whether every certificate of compliance carries an issuer's registration number. If either answer is no, you have a live problem rather than a filing problem, and it will surface at a sale, a refinance or an insurance claim.
Then take the next job you are about to sign and read the handover schedule before you sign it. Add the six items above to it, in writing, and let the contractor price them. That is the only moment in the entire project when they cost you nothing.
