A national OVK register — what Boverket has proposed

There is today no national register of OVK. If you want to know whether a building has a valid ventilation inspection, you must ask the owner, read the certificate in the stairwell, or approach the municipal building committee. In its report Digitalisering av obligatorisk ventilationskontroll — Förstudie (report 2023:5), Boverket has proposed that such a register be established at national level, with Boverket as the registering authority and the ventilation inspectors as those primarily keeping the data current.

What the proposal means

The feasibility study sets out the benefits of handling OVK data digitally and centrally rather than as standalone documents held by each owner. Boverket sees significant value in better interaction between the actors in the OVK system — inspectors, building owners and municipal supervision.

What would change in practice:

Today	With a national register
The data sits in a report held by the owner	The data sits with an authority and can be looked up
Municipal supervision starts by asking the owner what was done	Supervision can start from the register
Buyers and tenants see only the stairwell certificate	Status can be checked independently of the owner
The next inspection date is calculated locally, differently everywhere	The date can be derived uniformly

It is a proposal, not law in force. Until something else is decided, the rules stand as they are: the owner is responsible for the inspection being carried out on time, for the certificate being displayed, and for being able to produce the report. We do not know whether, when or in what form a register will be introduced, and anyone claiming to know is guessing.

Is there a national register where you can check a building's OVK status?

No, not today. Energy performance certificates have a national register at Boverket, but OVK has no equivalent — that is precisely the difference Boverket's feasibility study addresses. To check a building's OVK status you must request the report from the owner or contact the municipal building committee, which is the supervisory authority and may hold documents in the matter. In a property transaction it is something to ask for in due diligence, not something that can be looked up.

Why the question is harder than it sounds

A register is only as good as its input, and the input today is thousands of inspection companies producing reports in as many layouts — from structured web reports to scanned paper. Getting from that to uniform data is the real work, not the database.

We work on the same problem from the other end, on individual owners' portfolios, and two observations from our own work say something about the difficulty:

• One report was quarantined rather than stored because the certificate issuer could not be established. The field was missing from the document, and filling it in would have been a guess.
• Another was quarantined because the stated next inspection date was six years out for an FTX system, which under BFS 2011:16 has three. One of the fields was wrong, and only a human can decide which.

Both cases are trivial to miss and impossible to detect afterwards if the system stores first and asks later. That is why we would rather stop a document than store an incorrect statutory date — the principle is described in OVK handling.

What to do meanwhile

None of this changes your duty. What applies is still:

• Keep track of the next inspection date per building — see the interval table.
• Display the certificate — see the display requirement.
• Have the reports accessible when supervision asks — see supervision and orders.

Should a national register arrive, whoever already holds structured data per building will have the least work ahead. But that is an argument for order, not a reason to buy a system today in anticipation.