Cape Town: The City Council approved the revised Municipal Planning By-law to enable the City to impound moveable property, in June last year. This included machinery and equipment that is being used for illegal building work when an order to stop work is ignored. This amendment is now assisting the City to clamp down on building contraventions.
Deputy Mayor and Member of the Mayoral Committee for Spatial Planning and Environment – Alderman Eddie Andrews stated that they have added this impoundment provision to the by-law to give the City immediate recourse in situations where owners continue with illegal building work, despite them issuing an order to stop work. Some owners ignored the orders, and continued their construction work as they are prepared to pay the fines involved.
In the meantime and as the given fact, these matters often take considerable time to be concluded in court. The surrounding communities are impacted while they are seeking legal recourse. They can now impound the developer’s movable property. The owner’s moveable property and those belonging to the contractor involved in the illegal work.
Deputy Mayor Andrews expressed that he is happy to say that in the four cases where they have issued Notices of the intent to impound that the illegal building work has stopped immediately. They trust that this is a trend which will gain momentum.
Since the start of the impoundment project in March 2026:
- Four Intention to Impoundment Notices have been served in Diep River, Hout Bay, Milnerton and Mowbray.
- No actual impoundments have taken place yet, as the illegal building work has stopped immediately after the Notices were served.
As per the sources, the City has 76 building inspectors who conduct on average 16,000 inspections per month at building sites across Cape Town. The most common contraventions are building without an approved plan or deviating from approved plans and these are mostly by private individuals.
Alderman Andrews further stated that there is a culture of disrespect towards the rules and regulations of the Municipal Planning By-law, National Building Regulations and the Development Management Scheme that assigns zoning rights. This is a challenge across the whole city and not a single suburb or planning area can be singled out.
He explained that issuing of Notices to stop illegal building work is also not a simple matter. It is sometimes a challenge to determine the ownership, or to get hold of the owner, as the Notice must be served on the owner.
Sometimes the inspectors are prevented from entering sites to conduct follow-up inspections and then a separate enforcement process is needed just to obtain access to see if there is compliance with the Notice. Court processes also take a long time to conclude and this not only frustrates surrounding neighbours, but the City of Cape Town as well.
Luckily, with the impoundment provision in the Municipal Planning By-law, they can deal decisively with those who display a flagrant disregard of the building and planning regulations.
This is a gamechanger for them as contractors do not want to take this risk of getting their equipment impounded when the owner of the property has not followed due process in getting approved building plans. This new enforcement regime is getting into higher gear, and they can already see a mind-shift taking place.