Roof Repair near you

Most repairs sit below the threshold. The Planning Portal sets out that repairs to, or re-covering of, an existing pitched or flat roof do not normally require a building control application where less than 25 per cent of the total building envelope is affected and less than 50 per cent of the roof is affected. Beyond those limits, or where the work involves structural alteration, the picture changes and further work to the whole roof, such as improving the thermal insulation, can be drawn in.

Two triggers catch people out on what they thought was a repair. The first is fire performance: approval is needed where the performance of a new covering would be significantly different from the old one in that respect. The second is weight, and the Planning Portal gives a figure — a new covering material that increases the weight of the roof covering by 15 per cent or more brings the work under the regulations, because the structure below has to carry it.

Where approval is needed, GOV.UK describes two routes: apply to a building control body, meaning your local authority's building control department or a private registered building control approver, or use someone registered with a competent person scheme, in which case you do not have to get approval yourself. Scotland is a separate system entirely, and mygov.scot lists changing roofs among the work needing a building warrant from the council's building standards department, with a warning that starting such work without one is an offence and can be fined. Northern Ireland works to its own technical booklets, including Booklet D on structure and Booklet C on site preparation and resistance to contaminants and moisture.

A good repair starts inside. A torch in the loft on a wet day shows where water is actually arriving, which is often several feet up-slope from the stain on the ceiling, and a look at the underlay, the wallplate and the rafter feet tells the roofer whether the fault is one unit or a pattern. From the ground, binoculars find slipped units, displaced ridge tiles and failed flashings without anyone leaving the lawn.

Access is then a legal decision, not a matter of preference. Regulation 4 of the Work at Height Regulations 2005 requires every employer to ensure that work at height is properly planned, appropriately supervised and carried out in a manner which is so far as is reasonably practicable safe, with the planning including the selection of work equipment and provision for emergencies and rescue. HSE's ladder guidance allows a ladder only where a risk assessment shows that equipment offering a higher level of fall protection is not justified because of the low risk and short duration of the task, recommends alternative equipment for anything needing more than 30 minutes at a time on the ladder, and expects the ladder to be level, stable and secured where reasonably practicable, used by someone competent.

Fragility governs the rest. HSE's roof work guidance says all roofs should be treated as fragile until a competent person has confirmed they are not, and its fragile surfaces guidance names fibre-cement sheets, rooflights, liner panels, corroded metal sheets, glass including wired glass, and rotted chipboard among the materials to expect, with stagings, guard rails, fall restraint, fall arrest or nets slung beneath the roof as the precautions and warning notices fixed on the approach. On a small repair, what this looks like in practice is a tower or a scaffold rather than someone leaning off a ladder onto a wet slope.

Repair is the proportionate answer where the covering is generally sound and the fault is local: one slope, one detail, one stack. Slate in particular rewards repair, because the material commonly outlives its fixings, and a slope suffering nail sickness can be stripped, sorted and re-laid with the original slate rather than sent to a skip. Flat roofs are often the same story, with the failure concentrated at an upstand or an outlet.

Repair stops being sensible when the same roofer keeps returning to different parts of the same roof, when units are so delaminated or spalled that walking the scaffold breaks more than it mends, when the underlay has perished across the whole roof, or when the battens will not hold a fixing. At that point the cost of scaffolding a roof twice in three years is the argument for doing it once, and the thermal element rules make a full re-cover the moment to improve the insulation as well.

Ask for the scope in writing before the work: which units are being replaced, whether ridges are being re-bedded or changed to a mechanically fixed system, what lead is being renewed and in what thickness, and how the access is being provided. Photographs taken from the scaffold before and after are the cheapest form of evidence a homeowner can ask for, because you will never see the work yourself.

Where the repair crosses into notifiable work, the certificate or the building control paperwork is what a buyer's solicitor eventually asks for, so file it with the deeds. Note also who carries the legal duties: HSE explains that a domestic client is any individual having construction work carried out on their home, or the home of a family member, that is not part of a business, and that the client duties pass to the contractor on a single contractor project, or to the principal contractor where more than one contractor is involved. TrustMark, the government-endorsed quality scheme for work a consumer chooses to have carried out in or around the home, is one further check on a firm and a route to complain.