Australia should adopt critical lessons from international experience in seeking to improve regulation around building product safety and compliance, an international leader in building regulation says.

Speaking during a summit held in Melbourne last week, Neil Savery, Managing Director for the Oceania region at the International Codes Council (ICC), says that important lessons should be learned from overseas in reforming building product safety regulation in Australia.

In his comments, Savery highlighted several themes which are common in effective approaches internationally.

These include driving a culture of compliance and accountability through strong regulatory action, independent third-party testing and verification of products and clear and harmonised regulation.

Several examples were highlighted.

In the United States, the country achieves a high level of product compliance despite a fragmented system that involves approximately 33,000 individual regulatory jurisdictions across individual states, counties and cities.

According to Savery, several factors lie behind this.

Whilst the US is like Australia in having a performance-based system embedded into building codes, the country has widely adopted the internationally published I-Codes, which reference thousands of highly prescriptive standards.

This has enabled the development of a large number of product reference standards with which manufacturers need to demonstrate compliance.

In Australia, by contrast, fewer product standards are referenced in the National Construction Code (NCC).

As a result, product specifiers, certifiers and others are left to determine the suitability of specific products for particular uses via a range of means which are allowable under the evidence of suitability provisions that are contained within the National Construction Code. These include CodeMark certification, certificates, reports from accredited tested bodies and engineering reports.

Another factor behind the US success is a strong industry culture.

In part, this is driven by local government building officials who demand that evidence of suitability reaches a certain level. This drives a culture whereby product specifiers and manufacturers understand that products will not be accepted if the specified level is not achieved.

On this last point, Savery says that similar phenomenon can be observed in New Zealand, where local government officials insist upon CodeMark certification or equivalent.

Turning to Europe, Savery says that the European Union has strong regulation of building product safety with a coordinated approach.

This occurs through joint European standards and directives which are then reflected in building regulations within EU countries.

Under many of these harmonised standards, products require ‘CE marking’ before they can be sold anywhere within the Union. This signifies that the products in question have been assessed to meet EU standards in health, safety and environmental protection.

To gain CE marking, independent third-party certification is required.

Once products have been certified, mutual recognition arrangements enable them to be sold throughout the EU.

These arrangements are supported by an international network of surveillance, which often takes place at the point of sale.

Turning to the United Kingdom, the country has established a construction products regulator that sits within the Office of Product Safety and Standards. The new regulator will have power to remove any unsafe products from the market and to prosecute firms who flout safety laws.

As part of the new regulator’s establishment, the importance of publication of high-quality information on a regular basis to demonstrate compliance has been recognised.

Turning to Asia, products relating to fire safety in Singapore are regulated by the Singapore Civil Defence Force.

These products need to be certified by an accredited body and tested to meet required standards.

Finally, Savery says that excellent guidance is provided through the Building Products Performance Good Practice Regulatory Framework developed by the International Building Quality Centre.

This document outlines key elements of international best practice in building product regulation. These include governance, evidence of suitability, sample testing and re-testing, product identification and documentation, supply chain responsibility, product traceability, practitioner roles and responsibilities and compliance and education.

Savery’s comments were made during a panel discussion that was held as part of the Building Product Assurance Summit hosted by Master Builders Association of Victoria last week.

The discussion was moderated by RMIT Associate Professor Trivess Moore.

In addition to Savery, panelists included Victoria Building Authority CEO Anna Cronin and lawyer and construction law reform advisor Bronwyn Weir.

It came as Weir earlier unveiled key recommendations of an as-yet unpublished report which she was commissioned to prepare on building product safety reform.

The report was commissioned by the Senior Officers Group, which provides policy advice to the Building Ministers Meeting – a national forum of Commonwealth and State building ministers at which critical decisions on national building industry reform are made.

Its key recommendations included:

• insertion of new product labelling, traceability and mandatory information requirements into the evidence of suitability provisions which are contained in the NCC
• creation of a national building product register
• expansion of chain of responsibility laws across Australia; and
• changes to ensure building product quality in offsite construction.

Significant work remains to determine how the recommendations will work in practice.

However, key recommendations are understood to have support from building ministers.

Asked about the biggest are of opportunity for change contained within the recommendations, Weir said that each of the proposals are important including the national building product register.

But the most significant ‘game changer’ will be the introduction of traceability requirements into the evidence of suitability provisions in the NCC.

On this matter, the proposed reforms will require all new building products to be able to be traced through the building product supply chain. This could be done through barcodes, QR codes or chips.

According to Weir, benefits will be enormous.

“I think the traceability requirements will be a game changer for industry,” Weir said.

“Not only will they help to provide transparency, they have the potential to increase productivity enormously.

“If you think of the barcodes that we have in supermarkets and the way that these are able to track product and the movement of product, if we have that on all building products and we use barcodes to track supply, we could make sure that substation issues are identified.

“We can see a world where the architect has the specifications and every product specified has a barcode. The builder zaps the barcode to order the product. The product gets zapped when it arrives on site and then gets installed and the installer zaps it again. We have ‘tick, tick, tick, tick tick – that’s the product, no-one coming in between and putting in a product which does not match the barcode.

“The productivity around that is enormous. The transparency around that is enormous. The potential for the barcode identifier to take you to evidence of suitability in an efficient way is enormous.”

Speaking in a Victoria-specific context, Cronin says that product certification will play a critical role in addressing fundamental areas of focus that have been identified as part of a widespread review into building industry reform in that state.

These include greater accountability, more robust oversight and putting consumers first.

In particular, Cronin says that the proposed national product register has the potential to address many of the regulatory failures which are currently occurring.

In Victoria, this could be referenced in a new Building Act which the Victorian Government is currently considering as part of the reform program.

For the register to be effective, Cronin says that the mandating of designated products will be critical.

Weir says that Australia’s efforts to improve building product quality and safety over the past decade have been too slow and have fallen short of what is needed.

But she says that momentum is now building as a result of Commonwealth and state climate agendas.

“The movement here, the momentum is really coming out of the environmental area and the decarbonisation carbon credentials,” Weir said.

“Governments are all over that like a rash. That’s what’s going to drive this through.

“You can sit there and say, ‘hang on a minute, isn’t product safety more important (compared with sustainability) in your assessment’? I would say ‘yes but I will take the trojan horse that will take this through.’”

“We got nowhere in trying to get product safety regulated in this country over the past ten years.

“If governments want to use environmental sustainability and climate change as the reason why we need more transparency on products, I’m all for it.”

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