Machine-readable by design: what FAIR data means for digital building control
7 September 2026
The WhatsApp problem: when the chat becomes the record
8 September 2026
The industry’s use of WhatsApp generates an unacceptable mismatch between how it communicates and what the law requires. What needs to change? PlanRadar’s Rob Norton offers his take.
Let’s think about how construction sites work day-to-day. Taking a typical hypothetical as our starting point: a subcontractor sends a voice note at 7.43am about changing the flashing detail on a roof junction. The site manager listens, replies with a thumbs up, and gets on with their day. An hour later, a different instruction arrives in the same thread, this time about insulation thickness. By lunchtime, three separate decisions affecting the development have been made and accepted, but also stored in a group chat that is never formally logged. This happens daily, and on the surface, it seems effective, but it’s storing up serious problems down the line.
WhatsApp didn’t take over site communication by accident. Formal tools were seen as too slow, too clunky or simply never adopted outside head office. Moreover, WhatsApp was already on everyone’s phone, and it was fast and free, without the need for a licence fee or a training day. This meant it won by default; the industry let it happen. But winning by default is not the same as being fit for purpose.
When the chat becomes the record
The structural problem is this: decisions that get made in group chats rarely make it onto the official project record. Instructions sent by voice note cannot be traced, and approvals that exist only on someone’s phone can disappear the moment that person leaves the project or the company. The record goes, usually without being transferred. For most of construction’s history, this was an operational inconvenience. Disputes were messy, but they were manageable.
The Building Safety Act has changed the landscape, requiring a complete, auditable record of all decisions affecting building safety. The associated golden thread is a legal obligation to demonstrate the right decisions were made by the right people, for the right reasons, and that those decisions were properly recorded at every point in a building’s lifecycle.
A WhatsApp thread does not satisfy that obligation, and we now have an unacceptable mismatch between how the industry communicates and what the law requires.
The courts have started to make this concrete. In Jaevee Homes Ltd v Steve Fincham [2025], the Technology and Construction Court ruled that a genuine construction contract worth £248,000 had been formed via WhatsApp messages, not the official subcontract document that followed. A one-word reply, “Yes”, was treated as legally binding.
In a separate case, Lloyds Developments Ltd v Accor Hotel Services UK Ltd [2024], the court confirmed that WhatsApp messages held on personal devices are disclosable documents in litigation, so owning a private phone provides no exemption.
RICS has since advised that data management policies must explicitly cover how data on messaging platforms gets recorded, retained and managed. The legal community has caught up with site reality and project teams need to take note.
The cost of fragmented records
The financial exposure is serious, with poor-quality data having cost contractors $1.6 trillion globally in 2020. It’s a figure which sounds far-removed until you trace it back to its source: decisions that were never logged or instructions that couldn’t be evidenced.
WhatsApp-dependent workflows directly contribute to that fragmentation. When 80% of project data sits in unstructured channels, chat threads, personal inboxes and camera rolls, teams spend more than 11 hours a week chasing and reconciling it. It has a significant effect on project delivery, sapping time, energy and resources from already time-pressured builds.
For subcontractors, the downstream consequences are painful, from disputes arising over verbal instructions to variations being challenged because there’s no contemporary record. It means defect claims are widening because no one can evidence the original scope. Post-Grenfell, saying “I sent it in the group chat” is not a defensible position in a TCC courtroom, nor will it satisfy a Building Safety Regulator inspection.
A ban is not a solution
I’m not arguing for banning WhatsApp on site: that ship has definitely sailed, and the instinct to grab a phone and get on with it is understandable. What I’m arguing for is a clear distinction that most site teams have never been asked to make: the difference between using a tool for communication and maintaining a proper system of record-keeping.
Any decision or instruction that matters – a spec change, a sign-off or a variation – needs to be logged in a formal platform at the point it’s made.
Some teams are already bridging this gap using WhatsApp to trigger formal workflows rather than replace them. This could be a message in the chat that prompts an entry in the project platform, creating the time-stamped and geo-tagged record that the chat itself never could.
Getting site teams to change their communication habits requires assertive leadership. If the project manager is still approving changes by voice note, the team will follow their example, and it means senior leaders need to mandate structured digital workflows across every project and every supply chain tier. Otherwise, the gap between how decisions are communicated and how they’re recorded will persist and it will grow. The Building Safety Regulator now operates with its own enforcement mandate, so superficial compliance won’t cut it.
The audit you should run this week
Here is a practical challenge that any project director or manager reading this can accept. Pick any live project and ask yourself two questions: where are the decisions actually being made? And where are they being recorded? If the answer to both questions is the same place (a formal, auditable and accessible platform), you’re in reasonable shape. If the answer to the first question is “WhatsApp” and the answer to the second is “nowhere in particular”, you have a compliance gap that is growing with every group chat, and it’s time to close the gap and mitigate the risk before it gets out of hand.
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