okay, our bid on the house was accepted, and we've had a full survey done. It's been returned with loads of issues (some we knew, some we didn't) and a lot of that comes under a different topic. The one I'm asking about now is:
One of the downstairs walls was altered. They took part of it down, as well as a doorway, in order to expand the kitchen space into the utility room space. There's an archway there now. The surveyor said to check with our legal advisor as to whether or not planning permission was acquired for it.
Now, as far as we know, "planning permission" as such is only needed for changes made to the outside of a building. However, we know (or, have been learning on the fly here!) that they would have needed to make sure that building regulations were followed when they did this work.
So our question is, where do we find out whether or not they did that? We have already done our own short search for planning permission requests, and obtained the one for the conservatory (which turned out not to be needed, so they actually didn't have any paperwork there, just that the request was put in). Is there another database for building regulation issues? Or - what?
Any help would be appreciated! And yes, we do have a solicitor, and they're running whatever searches they normally do, but they're moving glacially and since we've found out about this issue, we'd like to know what's up with it ASAP.