For residents of Sydney’s Opal Tower, being evacuated on Christmas Eve in 2018 after hearing cracking sounds was just the start of their problems.

Residents – who are suing the Sydney Olympic Park Authority and the NSW Government – now say that over 500 defects have been found in their building ranging from façade to hydraulic issues, according to News.com.au.

Their insurance premium has risen by around tenfold.

Debacles such as these have led to a crisis of confidence about the quality of buildings throughout Australia.

It is this that NSW Building Commissioner David Chandler is determined to reverse.

Appointed to the newly created role last August, Chandler is driving a work program which will help to deliver on the NSW Government’s six pillar plan for building reform announced in January.

During a webinar hosted by UDIA NSW last month, Chandler outlined what he was doing. He spoke about a five-year vision which would see confidence in building quality restored, insurers return to the market and the emergence of insurance products which offer ten-year cover.

Principles of Reform

According to Chandler, several principles are guiding his approach.

First, regulation should focus on those who represent the greatest level of risk. On this score, Chandler describes a consensus based around three groups of industry players. At the bottom, there are 10-20 percent who represent the greatest level of risk to the industry. Beyond that, a further 20 percent are less risky whilst 60-70 percent at the top can be trusted to deliver good work.

In light of this, Chandler says regulatory effort should focus on the most risky players. For those proven to be trustworthy, regulation should be as lighter burden as possible.

Next, focus should revolve around entire project teams rather than individual players.

For too long, Chandler says, regulatory focus has centred around individual parties. Often, this has led to action being deferred until down the track when defects become evident and the punishment of individual parties long after the opportunity to get things right has lapsed.

Instead, attention should be directed toward entire project teams and the likelihood that the team as a whole will deliver a building which is well designed and well-constructed.

Third, buy-in from industry players is critical.  Regulation, Chandler said, should be not so much about brining in an army but rather encouraging those within the industry to commit to ongoing improvement.

Forth, tools under development should be able to be applied not just in New South Wales but also across other jurisdictions both in Australia and internationally.

Ideas about each jurisdiction building their own tools, Chandler says, are outdated in a global marketplace.

NSW Building Commissioner David Chandler OAM

Three Tools to Drive Grounbreaking Change

In terms of initiatives, a critical part of the Commissioner’s work program involves developing tools to deliver greater visibility of projects on which problems are likely.

Three solutions are being developed.

First, the Commissioner is working with software firm BRD to develop an internal platform which will provide a single view of all inspections and compliance reports for any given project.

As things stand, Chandler says inspectors in areas such as gas, plumbing, building and WHS operate in data silos and there is little visibility of inspections across entire projects.

Instead, BRD is building a set of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) which will connect the various certifications and reports and enable a ‘single view of project’ across each of the reports. This will facilitate creation of a line of site in respect of projects which exhibit early indications of potential problems. Such indications could include unsafe practices, site clutter, lack of  drawings on site to guide how buildings should be constructed or lack of a competent site supervisor.

From this, there will be opportunities to create dashboards and reports for inspectors as well as public facing reports for external stakeholders such as ministers and analysts.

Next, the second tool under development will look at the overall risk profile of a building and the likelihood that the project team will deliver a final product which is compliant with standards and is of good quality.

Known as Building Assurance Solution, the tool will use a register of immutable certificates from the aggregated materials to individuals who have contributed to design, construction and maintenance in order to calculate an overall Trustworthiness Index for a building.

Specifics about how this will work are still being determined. A tender for the development of the solution closed in June.

Nevertheless, a concept model suggests that it will derive inputs from three sources:

• Parties involved in the design and construction of the building, including property developers, head contractors, architects/engineers, electricians, gasfitters, fire & safety design professionals and others
• The certifier – including his or her professional credentials, years of experience and any penalty units which have been awarded against him or her
• The suppliers and materials being used, such as whether or not steel grades have been supplied to accepted Australian Standards and validated by third party product certifications and other materials which have been used in areas such as cladding.

According to Chandler, this will not be a tool which the Building Commissioner will own but rather one which will be developed by the successful tenderer and subsequently purchased by the Commission as a service.

Beyond the Commission itself, Chandler says the tool will be critical in generating renewed interest in construction from insurers, for whom it will provide a basis upon which to introduce differential pricing based on the risk profile of individual projects. The tool will also deliver a line of sight which could help  to underpin the emergence of ten-year insurance policies.

The tool will also be useful to local councils and consumers.

Finally, the third solution will create a compliance check in respect of essential documents and will compare accredited design drawings with as-built drawings in order to identify gaps or inconsistencies.

Under this system, a ‘smart title block’ will be created which will capture accredited designs which are entered into NSW’s new e-planning platform along with the identity and accreditation credentials of the designer who entered the design into the system.

The system will also capture the as-built drawings which are lodged along with the identity and accreditation credentials of the builder who entered these.

At first, the system will be used not to actually read drawings but instead to simply ensure that each set of design drawings is matched by a corresponding set of as-built drawings.

Over time, however, advancements in artificial intelligence may enable the identification of gaps and inconsistencies between design and as-built drawings. Indeed, during a recent test run, 200 design drawings were fed into a system along with 200 as-built drawings. Within three seconds, the system returned a result which identified six anomalies.

All this, Chandler says, will create visibility regarding the risk-profile of projects and will enable the regulator to focus on those projects where problems are likely.

Other work to drive reform

In addition to the technology initiatives, work is underway in several other areas to deliver on the government’s reform program.

Examples include:

• Working with industry to map out a future legislative landscape which will form the basis for a likely second tranche of legislative reforms
• Undertaking an assessment of critical skills which are missing not so much in trades but across broader areas such as technological capabilities and multi–disciplinary design integration
• Working with industry to develop a standardised form of building contract and a standardised form for engagement of design consultants
• Undertaking work to better understand how many buildings have material defects.

Meanwhile, an audit program is being introduced in three phases, with audits of occupation certificates starting from July followed by audits of declared designs and declared as-built drawings commencing in July 2021 and July 2022 respectively.

Inspectors will work in teams of three: an architect, an engineer and a builder. Sixty inspectors have been chosen (twenty from each discipline) – each with a minimum of fifteen years’ experience.

Defining the Future Regulator

Finally, work is underway to define how the regulator should operate over the long term.

Whilst initially, there had been ideas suggestions about a simple Building Commission, Chandler says this has given way to the idea that work was needed to define how a future regulator should operate, what its role should be and where it should direct its resources.

Toward this end, consultation with industry and other stakeholders will take place with a view to forming an idea of how this should work by early 2022.

Overall, Chandler says the reform program represents an unprecedented opportunity to rebuild confidence in construction quality.

“The is the largest micro-economic reform in our industry in its history,” Chandler said.

“Our collective resolve must be to make customers feel safe to get back into the market as soon as possible.”

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