The Australian and Building Codes Board (ABCB) has been engaging with stakeholders across the building and plumbing sectors to better understand the challenges of using the National Construction Code (NCC) and identify opportunities to improve how it is structured, presented and applied.
The ABCB has released an NCC user survey feedback summary which shows how strong the support for simplifying the NCC is. Standing out are how users overwhelmingly struggle to find guidance and examples, and clearly understand their requirements. There are three key needs being highlighted:
Users want to be able to find their requirements faster and more easily
Users want clarity, interpreting the NCC with less ambiguity
Users want the apply requirements with confidence.
The ABCB is now giving stakeholders and industry members an opportunity to share specific examples and practical suggestions to help identify what targeted improvements to the NCC could be. Specifically:
NCC provisions that are difficult to interpret or apply
Which specific NCC provisions, clauses or requirements are difficult to interpret, understand or apply in practice?
Repeated Performance Solutions
Which Performance Solutions are repeated across similar projects?
Could changes to the NCC reduce the need to repeat them?
Further detail on these topics is provided in the key document link below.
Regular users of the NCC across the building and plumbing sectors, should participate.
You will have several months to participate. The ABCB have said they will provide plenty of notice before the closing date, however it’s always good to get that feedback in pro-actively.
Yes, on the ABCB website: click here.
You can provide feedback directly to the ABCB via email: [email protected] and ensure you copy [email protected] into your feedback. Alternately you can email your feedback directly to Ben to collate as part of a SPASA submission.