Community Facility Documentation Preparation Checklist

Find the document setting out who owns the land and on what terms your group occupies it, and read it rather than describing it from memory.

What everyone believes the arrangement to be and what the paper says are different often enough that reading it is worth the effort.

Note whether the group owns, leases, licenses or merely uses the land, and record who signed whatever arrangement is in place.

These four positions give the group very different room to act, and professionals need to know which one applies before advising.

Record who is entitled to agree to work on the land, and check whether that is the same set of people who sit on the committee.

Who may agree to work on land is a legal question for a suitably qualified adviser and the landowner, and is not settled by a committee.

Note any restriction, condition or right of way written into the papers, and take the exact wording to a qualified adviser.

Wording about restrictions and rights is interpreted by a suitably qualified adviser; a committee reading should never be relied on.

Record whether the arrangement has an end point or a review point, since that matters for a facility expected to last a long time.

Funders and professionals both ask about security of tenure early, and groups are frequently unable to answer the question.

Note who to ask if no document can be found, such as the landowner, the local authority or whoever ran the site before you.

Missing paperwork is common on long-standing community sites, and the useful step is naming who might hold it rather than searching harder.

Gather any plan of the site you can find, however old, and note on each one what it shows and where it came from.

An old plan is still useful if its age and origin are recorded; it becomes dangerous only when it is treated as current.

Ask whoever holds the site records for drawings of drains, cables and supplies, and note which ones you were unable to obtain.

What lies beneath a site is established by qualified professionals and the relevant utility bodies; existing drawings are never treated as reliable.

Record what you can see for yourself, such as covers, gullies, supply points, poles and marker posts, with photographs from fixed positions.

Visible evidence collected by the owner gives a professional somewhere to start, and it takes nothing more than a walk round with a camera.

Note where each supply enters the site and whether anybody has previously been told not to dig in a particular area.

Warnings of this kind are usually remembered by a caretaker or groundsman and are almost never written down anywhere.

Mark on a sketch what the drawings do not cover, so the gap is visible to whoever you brief rather than being discovered by them.

A professional treats an unmarked area as unknown only if told; otherwise they may assume the pack is complete.

Ask what the school, council or landowner already holds centrally, since the information often exists but not with the committee.

Records for community sites frequently sit in an estates or premises file that nobody thought to ask for.

Collect anything left from previous work here, such as handover packs, warranty documents, care instructions and drawings.

These packs are usually complete when handed over and scattered afterwards, so gathering them is mostly a matter of asking several people.

Note who carried out earlier work on the site and whether anybody still holds their contact details.

The people who built something are the fastest route to knowing what is underneath it, and that link is lost with each committee change.

Record what maintenance has been done since, and by whom, even where nothing was written down at the time.

Verbal recollection is imperfect but far better than nothing, and it explains conditions a professional would otherwise find puzzling.

Note anything that has failed here before and what was said about why, because a designer will certainly ask.

Repeat failures point at site conditions rather than workmanship, and the history is held only by long-standing members.

Ask the supplier whether any existing warranty still stands and what would affect it before you plan work nearby.

Whether a warranty remains valid is answered only by whoever issued it; ask before any work is planned close to the item it covers.

Photograph the existing elements that are expected to remain, since their condition at this point is worth having on record.

Condition at the start of a project becomes contested later, and dated photographs settle it without anybody having to argue.

Find the written record of the meeting that authorised this project, and note exactly what was agreed and what was deliberately left open.

Projects grow between meetings, and the authorising record is what shows whether the current scheme is still the one that was agreed.

Record who has been delegated to act and what that delegation actually allows them to do on the group's behalf.

Delegations are usually given informally and interpreted generously, which becomes a problem at exactly the wrong moment.

Collect the group's constitution or governing document, since a professional, funder or authority may ask what kind of body the group is.

Groups often cannot say what kind of body they are, and that answer affects who may sign and who carries responsibility.

Note any decision that has been superseded and keep both versions, so the change and its reason remain visible.

Keeping only the current decision hides why it changed, and the reason is usually the most useful part of the record.

Record who is the single point of contact for professionals, and confirm that the whole group accepts that is the case.

Several members contacting a designer separately produces contradictory instructions and slows everything down.

Keep consultation responses in their original form rather than only as a summary prepared for a meeting.

Summaries reflect whoever wrote them, and the original responses are what allow the group to answer a later challenge.

Record how people were asked, who was asked, and who was not reached at all by the method used.

The method shapes the result, and being able to describe it plainly is what makes a consultation credible to others.

Note objections and concerns in full, including the ones the group disagrees with or finds inconvenient.

Objections that vanish from the record reappear later with more force, and the group loses the chance to show it considered them.

Record what the group said it would do in response, since that becomes a commitment whether or not it was meant as one.

People remember exactly what they were told at a consultation event, and the group usually remembers only the outcome.

Note who spoke on behalf of a group and whether they had any mandate from it to do so.

A confident individual is frequently taken as representing a whole club, and the club may take a different view later.

Keep dated photographs of the notices, displays and meetings used to consult people about the project.

Evidence that consultation happened is asked for by funders and authorities and is impossible to reconstruct afterwards.

Keep a copy of every enquiry sent and every reply received, with the name and role of whoever answered it.

A reply without a name attached cannot be followed up, and follow-up is where most of the useful detail actually appears.

Record any reference given to you and repeat it in later contact, rather than describing the project again from scratch each time.

Restating a project in different words invites a different answer, and the group then holds two replies that disagree.

Note where advice was given informally, and treat it as a prompt to ask formally rather than as the answer itself.

Informal comment from an officer or official is not a decision; what applies at this site is confirmed formally through the local authority.

Ask the relevant governing body what it publishes for facilities of this kind, and keep whatever they send you.

Requirements for an activity come from its governing body and change over time; use what they supply directly rather than material found elsewhere.

Record who in the group is authorised to correspond with the authority, so that several versions of the project do not circulate.

Multiple enquirers produce multiple project descriptions, and the authority ends up responding to whichever arrived last.

Keep a visible list of the questions still unanswered, and note who is chasing each one.

Unanswered questions become assumptions on their own if they are not held somewhere the group has to look at them.

Ask your insurer what they need to know about the project and about the facility once it is in use.

What an insurer requires is answered only by that insurer; nothing recorded here has any bearing on cover of any kind.

Ask the landowner what they require to be notified about, and record their reply in writing rather than by recollection.

Landowner requirements are frequently conveyed in a conversation and then disputed once work is under way.

Note whether any grant, gift or donation carries conditions the group must meet, and read those conditions in full.

Conditions attached to support often constrain design, use and upkeep, and they are usually skimmed at the point of acceptance.

Record which neighbouring parties have been told about the project and exactly what they were told.

Neighbours compare accounts with each other, and inconsistent descriptions do more damage to a project than the scheme itself ever does.

Ask a qualified professional what consents this project might require and how to confirm that locally.

Whether any consent is needed here is established by the local authority; it differs between sites and is never assumed from another project.

Put everything in one place with plain naming, so a document can be found by somebody who was not involved in gathering it.

Naming that makes sense only to the person who filed it is the usual reason a pack becomes unusable as soon as the people change.

Record who holds the original papers and whether a second copy exists anywhere else at all.

Originals held in one house are lost the moment that person moves, and nobody discovers it until the papers are needed.

Note which papers exist only on paper and which exist only on one person's device or account.

Both are single points of failure, and identifying them is the step that lets the group do something about it.

Write a single index listing what the pack contains and what is known to be missing from it.

The list of what is missing is as useful to a professional as the documents themselves, because it tells them where to start.

Decide who hands the pack on when a role changes, and record that as part of the role rather than as a favour.

Handover happens reliably only when it is written into the role; otherwise it depends entirely on how the previous holder left.