Citizen Space

ARB consulted on the five draft guidance notes between 2 April and 14 May 2026.

We received 44 responses, including 18 from organisations. Thirty-two respondents were registered architects.

Overall, respondents supported the principle of issuing guidance in each area.

Agreement or strong agreement ranged from 50% for building safety to 61% for mentoring. However, the consultation also identified material concerns about proportionality, legal precision, the practical limits of an architect’s control, and the risk of guidance becoming excessively detailed or prescriptive.

The qualitative feedback was detailed and from expert stakeholders, and has been useful in strengthening the final documents.

The guidance has been finalised and published on ARB's website.

We have also published a resources webpage, which provides relevant legislation, statutory guidance and recognised industry resources in one place to help architects understand and apply the Code in practice.

The Code is supported with guidance for how architects can apply the Standards in more specific contexts and in relation to particular topics. Draft guidance is being published and consulted on in phases.

The first tranche of guidance covers the topics of Dealing with Complaints, Professional Indemnity Insurance and Terms of Engagement. Guidance for these topics was consulted on between 26 February and 09 April 2025 and is now published.

This second tranche of guidance covered topics of Managing Conflicts of Interest, Managing Finances, and Raising Concerns and Whistleblowing.

The consultation was open for six weeks between 19 June and 31 July 2025. During that time, we received 11 responses.

There were some useful drafting suggestions for how the guidance could be improved, including adding further information on when architects should report themselves to ARB (within the Raising Concerns guidance) and providing specific examples of how conflicts of interest should be manged. 

There were no fundamental objections to any of the content in the guidance.

The finalised guidance has been published and can be accessed here:

https://arb.org.uk/architect-information/architects-code-standards-of-conduct-and-practice/ 

We asked for views on proposed changes to international routes to registration.

The proposals included an overhaul of the Prescribed Exam, and changes to the UK Adaptation Assessment, which is undertaken by architects joining the UK Register through one of ARB’s international agreements.

The consultation ran from 3 October 2024 to 6 January 2025 and received 59 unique responses.

Our proposals to move to a competence-based assessment (88%) and for a single point of entry to the UK Register (80%) received the highest levels of support in our consultation.

Of all our proposals, support was lowest for our proposal to move to an accreditation approach (58%) rather than run the exams in-house. Respondents expressed concern that the cost of the assessment, exam or route must be affordable for candidates. Potential providers of the exam were also mindful of costs, and the question of whether there would be enough candidates and throughput for the model to be viable.

A more detailed summary and the full consultation analysis report is available here.

We will continue our plans to introduce a competence-based assessment in a modernised format, simpler eligibility requirements, and a single point of entry to the Register.

However, following consultation feedback and further market research, we intend to apply a contract model to outsource the assessments, rather than an accreditation model. This means that rather than providers developing assessments that we then approve, we will instead contract specific providers to run the assessment based on a service they’ll propose to meet our brief.

We still intend to introduce the new the Prescribed Exam and UK Adaptation Assessment in 2027, to align with our education reforms. A detailed implementation plan will be developed, with a further consultation scheduled for 2026. We hope to be able to introduce the new Competency Standards Group route for those with partial qualifications sooner, before the end of 2026.