Australian Building Codes Board Office Paper on the return to engineering through emphasis on the performance aspects of the National Construction Code and the reform changes happening from 2014

1. National Construction Code - Increased the use of performance
B. Ashe, R.Loveridge, M. Gaspari
Australian Building Codes Board
Canberra, ACT, Australia
ABSTRACT
Australia has had a performance-based code and a performance–based building regulatory
system for almost 20 years. Significant benefits have been delivered through the system,
however it is now recognized that action is necessary to bed down the current benefits and grasp
the additional opportunities. It is estimated that a potential $2.2 billion per annum (greater than
1% GDP) of productivity gains are possible through reform. The next installment of building
regulatory reform in Australia will achieve these productivity gains. A major part of the reform
agenda is the increased use of performance. A three arrows approach is being used to deliver the
increased use of performance. The three arrows being: engendering a performance mindset,
capacity building and quantification of performance.
INTRODUCTION
The construction sector is a significant industry for Australia and represents the second largest
sector of small business in the economy. As a result, constraining cost growth and improving
productivity has the potential to deliver significant economic benefits nationally. The next
installment of building regulation reform has a number of options to reduce the costs of
compliance whilst maintain health and safety standards; further consolidate consistency in
regulatory arrangements across and within jurisdictions; enhance access to and the utility of key
tools needed by users of the building and plumbing control systems to improve outcomes.
A 2012 report by the Centre for International Economics (CIE 2012) found that current building
regulatory reforms implemented progressively over the last 20 years are delivering $1.1 billion
per annum in benefits, with an additional $1.1 billion in potential benefits yet to be realized. This
paper will discuss the Increased Use and Quantification of Performance project which will assist
the achievement of these benefits.
BACKGROUND
The Australian Building Codes Board (ABCB) is a Council of Australian Government (COAG)
standards writing body that is responsible for the National Construction Code (NCC) which
comprises the Building Code of Australia (BCA) and the Plumbing Code of Australia (PCA). It
is a joint initiative of all three levels of government in Australia and was established by
an Intergovernment-agreement (IGA) signed by the Commonwealth, States and Territories on 1

2. March 1994. A new IGA was signed by Ministers, with effect from 30 April 2012 (ABCB 2012).
The mission is to address issues of safety and health, amenity and sustainability in the design,
construction and performance of buildings. It is also a regulatory reform vehicle for COAG.
The NCC, comprising the Building Code of Australia (Volumes One and Two) and the Plumbing
Code of Australia (Volume Three), is a performance-based code. This means that it defines how
buildings, building elements, and plumbing and drainage systems must perform to achieve the
mandatory Performance Requirements.
The benefit of having a performance-based NCC is that it provides practitioners with a strong
degree of flexibility to determine the most appropriate means for demonstrating compliance with
the relevant Performance Requirements.
The Next Instalment in Building Regulatory Reform
Earlier this year Australia’s building and plumbing Ministers (Department of Industry 2014)
agreed to significant building regulation reforms with the potential to unlock an additional $1.1
billion in economic benefits annually, including making future editions of the National
Construction Code (NCC) available free online.
To capture these additional benefits, the next instalment of building regulatory reforms includes:
• quantifying the NCC’s Performance Requirements to facilitate greater uptake in their use
and therefore the application of new, innovative and cost effective solutions to building
design and construction;
• enhancing access through a free NCC and improving the document’s useability to
broaden understanding and consistency in interpretation;
• reduction in State and Territory departures from the NCC and consolidation of regulation,
to improve national consistency;
• limiting the imposition of higher prescriptive standards for building design and
construction than those agreed to nationally through the NCC by other authorities, such
as local governments; and
• continued expansion of the NCC to cover all on-site building regulations into a single
source document for national consistency and remove unnecessary overlaps in regulation.
The goal is to increase awareness and adherence to the NCC, improve building outcomes
through higher levels of compliance and deliver the national economic benefits. This will be
achieved through:
• the development and application of new technologies to deliver the NCC to a wider
audience (currently 12,000; estimated 200,000);
• improving the structure, format, language and presentation of the NCC content to make it
more readily useable to the expanded audience;
• working with industry and training providers in developing education and awareness
material to help improve practitioner understanding of the NCC;
• reviewing the future role of accepted construction practices for Volume 2;

3. • increased harmonisation of the building and plumbing codes;
• in conjunction with the State and Territory administrations, develop national practice
notes to enhance consistency in interpretation of certain features of the NCC; and
• reviewing the NCC to remove unnecessary, superseded or duplicative regulation.
Survey of NCC subscribers
In order to inform the strategy and prioritize quantification the ABCB surveyed NCC subscribers
in late 2013. 605 subscribers responded to the survey, representing approximately 5% of NCC
subscribers. Respondents represented all major disciplines and all jurisdictions and ranged from
individuals working on domestic dwellings to large commercial buildings.
The key findings of the survey indicated:
• Use of the performance in Australia is not progressing as expected.
• Quantification of Performance Requirements will have significant benefits
• The main barriers to the use of performance include:
o Risk of not obtaining approval
o Cost prohibitive
o Incorrect understanding of the NCC hierarchy
o Delays and costs associated with fire service referral
o Poor perception / experience of Alternative Solutions
o Risk averse certifiers
o Lack of quantified Performance Requirements
THREE ARROWS
In order to increase productivity through the increased use of performance a three arrows
approach has been adopted. The three arrows, implemented in a parallel are considered necessary
to deliver the increased productivity. Individual implementation is weak, while parallel
implementation is strong. The three arrows are:
1. Engendering a performance mindset
2. Capacity building
3. Quantification of Performance
Engendering a performance mindset
Of the $1.1billion per annum of productivity gains delivered by the ABCB reforms the vast
majority of the gains, approximately 70% come from the performance-based code.
As highlighted by the CIE report, increased use of performance has, and will deliver, the
majority of productivity gains. In order to increase the use of performance, we firstly need to
engender a performance mindset. It has recently become evident, through the survey of NCC

4. subscribers, feedback from the seminar series, and the review of the NCC and supporting
documents, that a prescriptive mindset exists.
The performance-based NCC has been in existence for over 18 years, and the reason for the
existence and extent of the prescriptive mindset is surprising.
By way of example, a summary of current mindset is:
If the DTS does not suit, use an Alternative Solution.
While the approach should be:
I need to meet the Performance Requirements, so which pathway should I choose.
Capacity building
The objective of this activity is to engender a performance mindset within industry practitioners
(both future and current practitioners).
For future practitioners, this will be through reform of current tertiary education courses. It is
evident that contemporary students of building related courses have not been educated on the
design flexibility provided via the performance-based NCC. Instead, it is evident that ‘building’
related courses typically deliver programs that concentrate on the application of deemed-to-
satisfy provisions of the NCC and consequently, graduates enter the workforce without the
knowledge necessary to operate effectively within a performance-based design work
environment.
The objective of this activity is to engender a performance mindset within existing practitioners
who do not have the knowledge necessary to work within a performance-based design
environment, or who may have the knowledge and limited experience within a performance-
based design environment. A significant proportion of existing practitioners are expected to fall
within either of these two descriptors.
The ABCB will liaise with industry education providers in an endeavour to garner support for
the development and delivery of appropriate programs for the education of existing practitioners.
Education of existing practitioners can be achieved through various processes such as formal
graduate education programs delivered by tertiary education providers, or informal ‘Continuing
Education Development’ (CPD) programs delivered by professional practitioner organisations.
The remainder of the paper will focus on the quantification of performance.

5. Quantification of Performance
The ABCB have instructed that all performance requirements be quantified by June 2016. Work
on this task started in July 2013 and is progressing well. Work is currently underway on the
following topics:
• Ultimate quantification
• Energy efficiency
• Structural reliability
• Weatherproofing
• Water conservation
• Fire safety
• Backflow prevention
• Ventilation
• Drinking water
• Bushfire
The following sections will cover three areas of quantification relevant to the SFPE audience.
Ultimate Health and Safety Quantification
The overall goal of the NCC is to ensure a tolerable level of health and safety in new building
and plumbing systems. This goal is reflected in the NCC Performance Requirements. The NCC
Performance Requirements are a surrogate for the individual and societal risks in new buildings
that have regard for the societal needs and expectations. Therefore, if possible the requirements
should be quantified at this level. This approach would have two primary advantages:
1. The health and safety goals would be clearly presented in terms of individual and societal
risks; hence meeting societal needs and expectations, and
2. Quantification at this level would allow ultimate flexibility in achieving these goals,
resulting in more effective, efficient and functional buildings and plumbing systems
while meeting the health and safety goals.
Experience has proved that the development of building and plumbing codes is mostly reactive
to significant events, in particular multi-fatality events (which can be broadly defined as societal
risk). In order to be proactive and target the prevention of multi-fatality events any quantification
should address both individual and societal risks.
As demonstrated by the historical record, multi-fatality events do occur. Although events
involving hundreds of fatalities tend to be associated with ‘natural hazards’ such as floods,
bushfires, etc., lesser events in Australia involving tens of fatalities do occur from time-to time.

6. In order to minimise the occurrence of future events and to assist those responsible for public
health and safety, a range of techniques have been developed over the last 30 years or so to
provide a means to predict the risks associated with a range of hazardous activities and
operations. Collectively, these techniques form quantitative risk assessment (QRA).
QRA results provide a means to indicate, in quantitative terms, the risks associated with
particular hazards. When the prime concern is the possibility of human fatalities, the results may
be expressed in terms of the level of risk to the individual or in terms of the risk to society as a
whole. The latter often takes the form of an ‘FN curve’ in which the frequency (F) of N or more
fatalities is plotted against N.
An individual risk criterion alone cannot prevent the too frequent occurrence of multi-fatality
events. When individual exposures are low, there could still be a chance that a single event
causes a large number of fatalities. As the Board is well aware, a large number of small events
(e.g falls) can go by largely unnoticed, while multi-fatality events can shock a nation (e.g. fires in
nursing homes). Psychometric studies have indeed shown that “dread”, or catastrophic potential,
is an important factor in explaining risk perception. To prevent the too frequent occurrence of
multi-fatality events, societal risk criteria are used. In general, it is a graphically represented by
an FN-curve that shows the exceedance probabilities of the potential numbers of fatalities.
The ABCB have engaged a consultant to further explore the use of individual and societal risk in
the NCC. The following is a summary of the findings
The recommendations for possible risk criteria for building risk assessment or regulation from
the research undertaken are that:
1. Individual and societal risks are generally expressed in terms of fatalities per year, although
some have attempted to include various levels of injuries as equivalent fatalities.
2. The societal risk criteria as illustrated on a F-N curve comprise three regions – broadly
acceptable, intolerable and As Low As Reasonably Practicable (ALARP), with
a. Anchor points at upper – (1, 1E-5) and lower – (1, 1E-6); and
b. Slope of between -1 and -2.
3. Individual risk criteria should be set such that the building adds a negligible level of risk
increase to the background risk levels of exposed individuals. In an Australian context this
appears to be a maximum additional risk of fatality of 1E-5 per year. This defines the upper
anchor point at (1, 1E-5).
4. The lower anchor point defines the area below which risk is broadly tolerable and is usually
taken as one or two orders of magnitude below the upper anchor point. Any specific decision
on where to set the lower anchor point would best be based on an assessment of current
building related risk and the demonstration requirements for those buildings falling in the
ALARP region.
5. The slope of F-N curves is considered neutral if the likelihood of events occurring decreases
at the same rate as the fatality rate increases. As society considers incidents with larger
numbers of fatalities in buildings as less acceptable, a slope of magnitude greater than -1 is

7. suggested. As NSW Planning has already published figures suggesting a slope of -1.5 in an
Australian context, it is considered that this is an appropriate balanced and initial starting
point or precedent for buildings, although this slope will need detailed policy considerations.
6. Further research into specific building risks needs be conducted to inform both the selection
of the lower anchor point and setting the steepness of the slope.
An example of possible F-N curves is presented below.
Our broad findings are that risk tolerance criteria and F-N curves may ultimately be able to form
part of a process of regulation of building design and approval. This may also be ultimately used
in quantitative analysis of proposed NCC changes.
The use of quantitative risk tolerance criteria to regulate the design of buildings and other
infrastructure would need to rely upon a number of factors being able to be satisfied. These are:
1. The need for a calibration study on the historical health and safety performance of buildings
across Australia be undertaken to cover different building types and different hazards to set a
baseline benchmark against which any future risk informed approach to building regulation
can be set
Slope = -1.5
Intolerable
ALARP
Broadly
Acceptable

8. 2. The ability to define realistic and acceptable criteria for both individual and societal risk for
buildings based on the concepts detailed in this report;
3. The ability to develop a robust methodology to reliably link component and system failure to
fatality outcomes in a foreseeable and deterministic manner;
4. The development of comprehensive failure and other data to allow the methodology to yield
reliable results;
5. The possible future linkage where necessary between use of risk tolerance criteria in building
regulation and appropriateness of risk tolerance criteria in a work health and safety
environment and process where the legal test for risk minimisation is “so far as is reasonably
practicable (SFAIRP)”; and
6. A longer term approach to education and training of all building industry professionals in the
practice of QRA methodologies, use of F-N curves, SFAIRP processes, etc.
Construction in Bushfire Prone Areas
Another area of current focus is on the quantification of construction in bushfire prone areas.
The wording of Performance Requirement GP5.1 of NCC Volume One and P2.3.4 of Volume
Two are similar. GP5.1 states:
GP5.1
A building that is constructed in a designated bushfire prone area must, to the degree necessary,
be designed and constructed to reduce the risk of ignition from a bushfire, appropriate to the—
(a) potential for ignition caused by burning embers, radiant heat or flame generated by a bushfire;
and
(b) intensity of the bushfire attack on the building.
To comply with this provision it would be necessary to demonstrate that, having regard to two
specified criteria, a proposed building has the capacity to ‘reduce the risk of ignition from a
bushfire’.
Therefore, to quantify this requirement it would be necessary to express a required level of
performance in terms of an acceptable level of risk, i.e. a probability of ignition of a building.
In order to identify an acceptable probability of ignition of a building, clause A0.5 of NCC
Volume One was considered. This provision establishes optional means of complying with
Performance Requirements, one of which is to formulate an Alternative Solution which is shown
to be at least equivalent to the Deemed-to-Satisfy Provisions.
In this context, it was considered that an acceptable probability of ignition for demonstrating
compliance with GP5.1 would be that inherent within the Deemed-to-Satisfy Provision, i.e.
Australian Standard 3959. A consultant was engaged to undertake the task.

9. During preliminary discussions with the consultant regarding the wording of the Performance
Requirements it was agreed that the words ‘reduce the risk of ignition’ may not express what is
actually required. It was considered that the fundamental performance requirement was that
ignition of external building elements did not result in ‘fire initiation within a building’ and that
this requirement should become the basis of the proposed Verification Method.
The consultant subsequently identified that the ‘probability of fire initiation within a building’
inherent within AS 3959 was 20%.
In light of clause A0.5 of NCC Volume One, it was accepted that the same level of risk could
form the basis of the proposed Verification Method for demonstrating compliance with P2.3.4
and GP5.1.
Development of a Verification Method is considered to be more appropriate than quantifying the
respective Performance Requirement as it provides an accepted pathway to compliance, while
still allowing flexibility to develop an Alternative Solution from first principles.
CONCLUSION
The Australia economy is in the process of transition from the mining and resource driven
growth to growth in the domestic services sector. To support this transition Australia has
embarked on the next installment of building regulatory reform. The overall aim of the reform is
to enhance productivity within the construction sector. A major component of this reform agenda
is the increased use of performance. It is estimated that productivity gains in the order of 1%
GDP are possible.
A three arrows strategy is being implemented to increase the use of performance. The three
arrows are: engendering a performance mindset, capacity building and quantification of
performance. By far the greatest challenge is changing the current prescriptive mindset to a
performance mindset.
The quantification of the performance requirements will also assist in the increased use of
performance and it is the aim to quantify all requirements by June 2016.
REFERENCES
1. Centre for International Economics (2013) Benefits of building regulation reform, CIE,
February 2013.
2. Department of Industry (2014) Media Release – Building Ministers’ Forum agrees to
National Construction Code reform, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Industry, 30
April 2014.
3. Australian Building Codes Board (2012) An Agreement between the Government of the
Commonwealth of Australia, the States and the Territories to continue in existence and
provide for the operation on the Australian Building Codes Board, 30 April 2012.

10. During preliminary discussions with the consultant regarding the wording of the Performance
Requirements it was agreed that the words ‘reduce the risk of ignition’ may not express what is
actually required. It was considered that the fundamental performance requirement was that
ignition of external building elements did not result in ‘fire initiation within a building’ and that
this requirement should become the basis of the proposed Verification Method.
The consultant subsequently identified that the ‘probability of fire initiation within a building’
inherent within AS 3959 was 20%.
In light of clause A0.5 of NCC Volume One, it was accepted that the same level of risk could
form the basis of the proposed Verification Method for demonstrating compliance with P2.3.4
and GP5.1.
Development of a Verification Method is considered to be more appropriate than quantifying the
respective Performance Requirement as it provides an accepted pathway to compliance, while
still allowing flexibility to develop an Alternative Solution from first principles.
CONCLUSION
The Australia economy is in the process of transition from the mining and resource driven
growth to growth in the domestic services sector. To support this transition Australia has
embarked on the next installment of building regulatory reform. The overall aim of the reform is
to enhance productivity within the construction sector. A major component of this reform agenda
is the increased use of performance. It is estimated that productivity gains in the order of 1%
GDP are possible.
A three arrows strategy is being implemented to increase the use of performance. The three
arrows are: engendering a performance mindset, capacity building and quantification of
performance. By far the greatest challenge is changing the current prescriptive mindset to a
performance mindset.
The quantification of the performance requirements will also assist in the increased use of
performance and it is the aim to quantify all requirements by June 2016.
REFERENCES
1. Centre for International Economics (2013) Benefits of building regulation reform, CIE,
February 2013.
2. Department of Industry (2014) Media Release – Building Ministers’ Forum agrees to
National Construction Code reform, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Industry, 30
April 2014.
3. Australian Building Codes Board (2012) An Agreement between the Government of the
Commonwealth of Australia, the States and the Territories to continue in existence and
provide for the operation on the Australian Building Codes Board, 30 April 2012.