NHBC Reportable Items and Quality Common Scoring

What a Reportable Item is

A Reportable Item, universally shortened to RI on site, is a specific item of work the NHBC inspector has seen and judged not to meet NHBC Standards. It is written into the inspection record for that plot, visible in the NHBC Portal, and stays open until it is remedied and evidenced.

The important distinction is that an RI is not the same as a snag. A snag is your own quality list. An RI is a warranty provider judging that the built work does not meet the standard the Buildmark cover is based on. That is why an RI can hold up a key stage sign-off, and why a run of them changes how often the inspector turns up.

Not everything an inspector mentions becomes an RI. Inspectors routinely point out items informally and give you the chance to fix them while they are on site. Once it is written up, it is a record, and the only route back is remedy plus evidence.

Damage Potential and how RIs are weighted

NHBC do not treat every RI as equal. Each one carries a weighting based on Damage Potential — how much harm the defect would cause if it were left in the finished home. A missing cavity tray over a window carries far more weight than an untidy mortar joint, because one produces a water ingress claim and the other does not.

In practice that means the RIs worth engineering out of your process are the concealed, structural and water-related ones. They score heavily, they are the ones that reach Buildmark as claims years later, and they are the hardest to remedy because they are buried.

High damage potential

Structural items, fire stopping, cavity trays and DPC bridging, drainage falls, foundation depth. Expensive to remedy, and the main driver of warranty claims.

Medium damage potential

Insulation gaps, ventilation paths, wall tie spacing, tolerance issues. Usually fixable in-programme if caught before the element is closed in.

Lower damage potential

Housekeeping, material storage, workmanship finish items. Individually minor, but they accumulate and depress a site score quickly.

Quality Common Scoring and the Construction Quality Review

Quality Common Scoring is NHBC’s way of turning inspection findings into a comparable number. Findings from each visit are scored, weighted by damage potential, and rolled up so that one site can be compared against another and against the national picture.

Those scores feed the Construction Quality Review — the periodic review NHBC hold with a builder’s senior team. This is the part site managers often miss: your individual plot RIs do not stay on the plot. They aggregate into a site score that your construction director sees, and that a regional NHBC manager discusses with your business.

A consistently poor score does not just look bad. It changes your inspection regime. Sites that score well can move towards fewer, more targeted visits under a risk-based approach. Sites that score badly attract more visits, more scrutiny and, in the worst cases, a hold on registrations.

Risk Based Inspections and the BTRMP

NHBC no longer inspect every site the same way. Each site gets a Bespoke Technical Risk Management Plan (BTRMP), which sets out which stages are inspected, how often, and what the specific risks on that site are — a piled foundation design, a timber frame system, a complex render specification, an apartment block with compartmentation.

Alongside the fixed key stage visits, the plan triggers Risk Based Inspections targeted at whatever the plan flags as high risk. If your site has a history of RIs at pre-plaster, expect more pre-plaster visits. The regime responds to your record.

Keep the BTRMP in the Site Record Book and read it. It tells you exactly which visits you have to book and what the inspector will be prioritising when they arrive — which is the cheapest possible preparation for a visit.

How to close a Reportable Item out properly

Closing an RI is a two-part job: remedy the work, then evidence it. The second half is where most sites lose time, because the remedy often gets covered up again before anyone photographs it.

• Read the RI wording carefully and fix what it actually says, not what you assume it means.
• Where the remedy needs a design input — a structural repair, a revised detail — get it in writing from the engineer or designer before the work is done.
• Photograph the remedy in progress and complete, with the plot identifiable in the frame and a date on the record.
• Upload the evidence against the correct plot in the NHBC Portal rather than emailing it to an individual inspector.
• Check it has actually been marked closed. An RI you believe is closed but which is still open in the system will surface again at pre-handover.
• Feed the cause back into the next plot. A repeated RI across plots is a process problem, not a workmanship problem.

Reducing RIs before the inspector arrives

The single most effective habit is to run the stage checklist yourself the day before the visit, with the drawings in your hand, and to photograph every concealed element as it is built rather than in a panic before the boarders arrive.

The second is to treat the first plot of each house type as the control. Get the inspector to look at it hard, resolve everything, and then repeat that detail. Most RI patterns on a site are a single detail being built wrong twenty times.