Category: Building & Construction

New housing in Australia must meet minimum energy performance requirements. We wondered how many buildings exceeded the minimum standard. What our analysis found is that four in five new houses are being built to the minimum standard and a negligible proportion to an optimal performance standard. Via The Conversation.

Before these standards were introduced the average performance of housing was found to be around 1.5 stars. The current minimum across most of Australia is six stars under the Nationwide House Energy Rating Scheme (NatHERS).

This six-star minimum falls short of what is optimal in terms of environmental, economic and social outcomes. It’s also below the minimum set by many other countries.

There have been calls for these minimum standards to be raised. However, many policymakers and building industry stakeholders believe the market will lift performance beyond minimum standards and so there is no need to raise these.

What did the data show?

We wanted to understand what was happening in the market to see if consumers or regulation were driving the energy performance of new housing. To do this we explored the NatHERS data set of building approvals for new Class 1 housing (detached and row houses) in Australia from May 2016 (when all data sets were integrated by CSIRO and Sustainability Victoria) to December 2018.

Our analysis focuses on new housing in Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia, Tasmania and the ACT, all of which apply the minimum six-star NatHERS requirement. The other states have local variations to the standard, while New South Wales uses the BASIX index to determine the environmental impact of housing.

The chart below shows the performance for 187,320 house ratings. Almost 82% just met the minimum standard (6.0-6.4 star). Another 16% performed just above the minimum standard (6.5-6.9 star).

Only 1.5% were designed to perform at the economically optimal 7.5 stars and beyond. By this we mean a balance between the extra upfront building costs and the savings and benefits from lifetime building performance.

The average rating is 6.2 stars across the states. This has not changed since 2016.

The data analysis shows that, while most housing is built to the minimum standard, the cooler temperate regions (Tasmania, ACT) have more houses above 7.0 stars compared with the warm temperate states.

The ACT increased average performance each year from 6.5 stars in 2016 to 6.9 stars in 2018. This was not seen in any other state or territory.

The ACT is the only region with mandatory disclosure of the energy rating on sale or lease of property. The market can thus value the relative energy efficiency of buildings. Providing this otherwise invisible information may have empowered consumers to demand slightly better performance.

We are paying for accepting a lower standard

The evidence suggests consumers are not acting rationally or making decisions to maximise their financial well-being. Rather, they just accept the minimum performance the building sector delivers.

Higher energy efficiency or even environmental sustainability in housing provides not only significant benefits to the individual but also to society. And these improvements can be delivered for little additional cost.

The fact that these improvements aren’t being made suggests there are significant barriers to the market operating efficiently. This is despite increasing awareness among consumers and in the housing industry about the rising cost of energy.

Eight years after the introduction of the six-star NatHERS minimum requirement for new housing in Australia, the results show the market is delivering four out of five houses that just meet this requirement. With only 1.5% designed to 7.5 stars or beyond, regulation rather than the economically optimal energy rating is clearly driving the energy performance of Australian homes.

Increasing the minimum performance standard is the most effective way to improve the energy outcomes.

The next opportunity for increasing the minimum energy requirement will be 2022. Australian housing standards were already about 2.0 NatHERS stars behind comparable developed countries in 2008. If mandatory energy ratings aren’t increased, Australia will fall further behind international best practice.

If we continue to create a legacy of homes with relatively poor energy performance, making the transition to a low-energy and low-carbon economy is likely to get progressively more challenging and expensive. Recent research has calculated that a delay in increasing minimum performance requirements from 2019 to 2022 will result in an estimated A$1.1 billion (to 2050) in avoidable household energy bills. That’s an extra 3 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions.

Our research confirms the policy proposition that minimum house energy regulations based on the Nationwide House Energy Rating Scheme are a powerful instrument for delivering better environmental and energy outcomes. While introducing minimum standards has significantly lifted the bottom end of the market, those standards should be reviewed regularly to ensure optimal economic and environmental outcomes.

Authors: Trivess Moore, Lecturer, RMIT University; Michael Ambrose, Research Team Leader, CSIRO; Stephen Berry, Research fellow, University of South Australia

From The Conversation. Hundreds of residents in a Sydney apartment complex, the 122-unit Mascot Towers, were evacuated last Sunday when cracks began to appear due to a serious structural failure. And it isn’t clear when the residents can return.

This crisis echoes the structural failure at Opal Tower and its evacuation on Christmas Eve last year. We have seen a series of serious building failures and fires in recent years. And state and federal governments have had more than year to act on recommendations for better construction regulations, but instead they’re shifting blame.

Although each building failure was different, the end result is the same: misery for the residents and a looming financial disaster for the owners.

New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian said:

We’re getting to the bottom of what happened. The NSW government will hold everybody to account, that’s our role.

But the government’s role is to regulate sufficiently to prevent building failures in the first place, not to hold people to account after the event.

Building regulations since the Great Fire of London

Prevention of construction failures has been the bedrock of building regulations ever since the Great Fire of London in 1666. In the aftermath, the English government realised there was not much use in raking through the ashes and trying to hold people to account, and that an ounce of prevention was worth a pound of cure. This led to the parliament passing regulations to prevent the spread of fire between buildings.

Governments all around the developed world took the lesson of the Great Fire to heart. Their common goal has been to proactively ensure buildings are constructed properly and are safe as a result.

This has been a pretty successful effort and most significant building failures since 1666 have contributed to a more comprehensive and effective regulatory regime.

Serious building failures appear to be more frequent

Prior to the Opal Tower emergency, there had been only one significant evacuation of a multi-unit residential building in NSW due to structural failure. That was a result of the 2009 gas explosion at Eastgate Towers in Bondi Junction.

However, depending on which research you read, either 72% or 97% of strata apartments suffer from serious defects when they’re finished.

There have also been a series of other problems with recent buildings. These include lead in water caused by imported brass plumbing components, non-complying imported electrical cables and failures in the installation of fire doors, fire walls and fire door frames.

Why has this happened?

The states progressively introduced the Building Code of Australia (now the National Construction Code) during the 1990s as part of an agreed plan between the states and the federal government to make building regulations less prescriptive.

The aim was to reduce the cost of construction by favouring “innovation” over conservative “deemed to satisfy” regulations. Innovation, in these terms, meant finding ways to make buildings cheaper to build.

This move coincided with the globalisation of the building materials supply industry and a boom in the construction of tall apartment buildings in Australia.

Some of the innovation has been innocuous, or even beneficial, such as the introduction of a variety of lightweight interior wall systems, but some have resulted in substantial remediation bills – combustible cladding being the prime example. Inspection and responsibility for the plethora of imported components is virtually non-existent.

The downstream cost of failure has landed squarely in the laps of the building owners, many of them owners of tall apartments.

It’s difficult to estimate the total bill for remedial works to tall apartment buildings built over the last 25 years, but it may well exceed the Productivity Commission estimates of savings resulting from the introduction of the National Construction Code.

Blame shifting and ineffective regulations

The federal minister responsible for building regulations, Karen Andrews, says the states are to blame.

And some states, including NSW, have resorted to tough talk about crackdowns on “dodgy” certifiers and “dodgy” builders. In reality, the problem is dodgy government regulation, by both federal and state governments.

The federal and state governments already have an initial plan for fixing these problems. The Shergold-Weir report was delivered to the Building Ministers’ Forum in February 2018.

As the report said:

After having examined the matters put to us, we have concluded that the nature and extent [of building defects] are significant and concerning. The problems have led to diminishing public confidence that the building and construction industry can deliver compliant, safe buildings which will perform to the expected standards over the long term.

Since then, state and federal governments have done almost nothing to implement the recommendations of the report, despite the 2018 Christmas Eve failure at Opal and the fire at Neo200 in Melbourne the following February.

The report itself states:

The recommendations have been designed to form a holistic and structured framework to improve the compliance and enforcement systems of the [National Construction Code] across the country. They form a coherent package. They would best be implemented in their entirety.

In NSW, the published response to Shergold-Weir is a patchwork focusing on holding people to account after a building construction event. This is the reverse of the proactive approach developed following the Great Fire of London.

The NSW government is set to appoint a building commissioner to oversee qualifications and to review building documentation.

But this will likely not achieve much, unless the government commits to upskilling workers throughout the industry and backs up desktop audits by increasing direct inspections on site. Neither of these things appears to be part of its plan.

All governments must take an active role in fixing the defective regulatory regime they have created. If they can’t get on with this process in a timely way, we will need yet another royal commission to sort it out.

The least Premier Berejiklian can do is to treat the Mascot Towers and Opal events in the same way the government treats natural disasters and provide housing assistance to residents who have been displaced through no fault of their own.

Author: Geoff Hanmer, Adjunct Lecturer in Architecture, UNSW

Consumers have more protection when buying a new fridge, than when buying a new property – according to an article in the The Conversation.

Regulation of the Australian building industry is broken, according to the Shergold-Weir report to the Building Ministers’ Forum (BMF).

[…] we have concluded that [the] nature and extent [of problems] are significant and concerning. The problems have led to diminishing public confidence that the building and construction industry can deliver compliant, safe buildings which will perform to the expected standards over the long term.

You can say that again.

Just one of the issues identified in the report, combustible cladding, could affect over 1,000 buildings across Australia. An unknown proportion of these are tall (four storey and above) residential strata buildings. Fears of rectification costs are starting to have severe impacts on the apartment market.

The cost of replacing combustible panels at the Lacrosse Apartments in Melbourne, which caught fire in 2014, will be at least A$5.7 million, plus A$6 million or so in consequential damages. The total cost of replacing combustible panels across Australia is unknown at this point, but is likely to run to billions of dollars.

The Shergold-Weir report identifies a catalogue of other problems, including water leaks, structurally unsound roof construction and poorly constructed fire-resisting elements. Faults appear to be widespread.

A 2012 study by UNSW City Futures surveyed 1,020 strata owners across New South Wales and found 72% of respondents (85% in buildings built since 2000) knew of at least one significant defect in their complex. Fixing these problems will cost billions more.

Regulatory failures are not only “diminishing public confidence”, they have a direct impact on the hip pockets of many Australians who own a residential apartment. In short, building defects resulting from lax regulation are a multi-billion dollar disaster.

How could authorities let this happen?

A web of regulations and standards enacted by governments cover construction in Australia, but this regulation is centred on the National Construction Code (NCC). The Australian Building Codes Board (ABCB), a body controlled by the Building Ministers’ Forum, manages the NCC. The ABCB board comprises appointed representatives from the Commonwealth plus all the states and territories and a few industry groups.

It is such a complicated system that it is hard to identify any government, organisation or person that is directly responsible for its performance.

The NCC is supposed to create “benefits to society that outweigh costs” but it appears the ABCB may have been more focused on the need to “consider the competitive effects of regulation” and “not be unnecessarily restrictive”. (Introduction to the NCC Volume 1; ABCB)

The BMF’s February 8 communique, issued after the fire in the Neo200 building in Melbourne, is straight out of the Yes Minister playbook:

Ministers agreed in principle to a national ban on the unsafe use of combustible ACPs (aluminium composite panels) in new construction, subject to a cost/benefit analysis being undertaken on the proposed ban, including impacts on the supply chain, potential impacts on the building industry, any unintended consequences, and a proposed timeline for implementation. Ministers will further consider this at their next meeting [in May this year].

This suggests the ministers are more concerned about possible impacts on the panel suppliers and the building industry than the consumer. The earliest a ban can take effect is in May. In the meantime, anecdotal evidence suggests buildings are still being clad in combustible ACP.

Thanks to the journalist Michael Bleby, we know governments and the ABCB failed to act in 2010 when presented with evidence that combustible ACP was not only a danger, but was also being widely used on tall residential buildings.

Bleby quoted ABCB general manager Neil Savery as saying neither his organisation, nor any of the states, was aware that builders were using the product incorrectly.

We also know that panel manufacturers, including the Australian supplier of Alucobond, actively lobbied building ministers. At the July 2011 BMF meeting, the ACT representative effectively vetoed an ABCB proposal to issue an advisory note on the use of combustible ACP.

We are entitled to ask why the ABCB and its staff, or the downstream regulators and their staff, did not know about serious fire problems with ACP that the technical press identified as long ago as 2000. The answer will be of particular interest to residents of tall apartment buildings clad in these panels, all of whom are now living with an active threat to their safety.

Consumers are owed better protection

While both Labor and Coalition governments have worked to improve consumer protection for people buying consumer goods, their record on housing, particularly apartments, is awful. While a consumer can be reasonably sure of getting restitution if they buy a faulty fridge, no such certainty exists if they buy a faulty house or apartment.

At the moment, the NCC does not have any focus on providing protection for buyers of houses or apartments. There are few requirements for the durability of components and astonishingly weak requirements for waterproofing. Under the NCC and its attached Australian Standards, particularly AS 4654.1 and 2-2012, a waterproof membrane could last, in practice, five minutes or 50 years.

Given the magnitude of the economic loss, it would be appropriate for the BMF and ABCB board to publicly admit they have failed. Since their appointments in November 2017 and January 2013 respectively, neither ABCB chair John Fahey nor Savery as general manager has remedied the situation. The Shergold-Weir report has not been implemented and the combustible cladding issues remain unresolved. It would be reasonable for Fahey to step down and for Savery to consider his future.

The next federal government should consider what further action should be taken, particularly in relation to individuals on the BMF and within the ABCB involved in the 2010-2011 decision not to issue the proposed advisory note on the use of ACP. Since the ABCB does not publish minutes and none of its deliberations are in the public domain no one knows what actually happened or who did what.

The new board should consider moving residential apartment buildings (Class 2 buildings in the NCC classification) from Volume 2 of the NCC to Volume 1, which controls detached and semi-detached housing. Volume 1 should then have as its overriding objective the protection of consumers.

The downstream regulators should focus on requiring builders to deliver residential buildings with no serious faults and providing simple mechanisms for redress if they don’t.

Surely this is not too much to ask.

Author: Geoff Hanmer, Adjunct Lecturer in Architecture, UNSW

From The Conversation.

After a three-year cycle of industry comment, review and revision, May 1 marks the adoption of a new National Construction Code (NCC). Overseen by the Australian Building Codes Board (ABCB), the code is the nation’s defining operational document of building regulatory provisions, standards and performance levels. Its mission statement is to provide the minimum necessary requirements for safety and health, amenity, accessibility and sustainability in the design, construction, performance and liveability of new buildings.

Some say the building industry is in deep crisis and broken, that even our entire building regulatory system is not fit for purpose. Consider what has happened, particularly in residential construction. We have had buildings burning, cracking, windows exploding, rooms with intolerable heat stress, rendered unfit for occupation without costly remedial action, class actions against developers, and multi-million-dollar court judgments against consultants and builders.

What have reforms to the old Building Code of Australia (BCA), now the NCC, delivered? Is the new code good enough?

Well, how do you measure performance? We should think in terms of lives saved, heat stroke minimised, costly remedial works avoided, less sleep deprivation and climate-induced respiratory issues, disability access, less bill shock for the vulnerable, and housing that is built to allow ageing in place.

Safety and amenity

Widespread use of non-compliant building materials, and specifically combustible cladding, has been foremost in the minds of regulators. Three years ago, after the Lacrosse fire in Melbourne Docklands, the ABCB amended the existing code. This crucial revision has been carried forward into the new code.

Individually, states have acted on the findings of a Senate inquiry into this area. Last October, for example, Queensland enacted the Building and other Legislation (Cladding) Amendment Regulation 2018.

Investigations into the highly publicised, structurally unsound Opal tower in Sydney found the design – namely the connections between the beams and the columns on level 10 and level 4, the two floors with significant damage — indicated “factors of safety lower than required by standards”.

Just two months ago when the new code was released in preview form, we learnt that a significant number of approved CodeMarks used to certify compliance for a range of building materials are under recall. The Australian Institute of Building Surveyors posted urgent advice: “We are in the process of making enquiries with the ABCB and Building Ministers to find out when they were made aware that these certificates were withdrawn and what the implications for members will be […] and owners of properties that have been constructed using these products.”

Fire safety concerns are driving changes in the code. The new NCC has extended the provision of fire sprinklers to lower-rise residential buildings, generally 4-8 storeys. However, non-sprinkler protection is still permitted where other fire safety measures meet the deemed minimum acceptable standard.

Comfort and health

The code includes new heating and cooling load limits. However, requirements for overall residential energy efficiency have not been increased. The 6-star minimum introduced in the 2010 NCC remains.

The code has just begun to respond to the problem of dwellings that are being constructed to comply but which perform very poorly in the peaks of summer and winter and against international minimum standards. The change in the code deals with only the very worst houses – no more than 5% of designs with the highest heating loads and 5% with the highest cooling loads.

It’s a concern that the climate files used to assess housing thermal performance use 40-year-old BOM data. Off the back of record hot and dry summers, readers in such places as Adelaide and Perth might be surprised to learn the ABCB designates their climate as “the mildest region”.

For well over a decade my colleagues and I have researched thermal performance, comfort and health and improvements by regulation. Our recent paper, based on a small sample of South Australian houses built between 2013 and 2016, demonstrated what has been discussed anecdotally in hushed voices across the industry, that a building can fail minimum standards using one particular compliance option yet pass as compliant using a different pathway.

A building that is not six stars can be built under the new code. In fact, it may have no stars!

Lamentably, there has been no national evidenced-based evaluation (let alone international comparison) of the measured effectiveness of the 6-star standard. CSIRO did carry out a limited evaluation of the older 5-star standard (dating back to 2005). An evaluation for commercial buildings is available from the ABCB website.

Accessibility and liveability

Volume 2 of the NCC covers housing and here it is business as usual, although the ABCB has released an options paper on proposals that might be part of future codes. Accessible housing is treated as a discrete project. Advocates for code changes in this area, such as the Australian Network for Universal Housing Design (ANUHD), have written to the ABCB expressing disappointment.

A Regulation Impact Assessment on the costs and benefits of applying a minimum accessibility standard to all new housing has yet to see the light of day.

These proposals or “options” talk of silver and gold levels of design (there is no third-prize bronze option for liveable housing). Codes of good practice in accessible design have for decades recommended such measures.

It’s all about performance

Some argue that deep-seated problems have developed from a code that favours innovation and cost reduction over consumer protection. There is a cloud over the industry and over some provisions – or should we say safeguards and compliance?

Safety should not be a matter of good luck or depend on an accidental selection of a particular building material or system. New buildings born of this new code are hardly likely to differ measurably from their troublesome older siblings. The anxiety for insurers, regulators and building owners continues.

The National Construction Code adopts a performance-based approach to building regulation, but don’t expect the sales consultant to know the U-value of the windows, whether the doors are hung to allow for disabled access, or if the cleat on your tie beam is to Australian standards.

Anyone can propose changes to the NCC. The form is on the website. Consultants will be hired to model costs and benefits.

Regulatory reforms introduced through the ABCB over the past 20 years have produced an estimated annual national economic benefit of A$1.1 billion. That’s a lot of money! The owners of failing residential buildings could do with some of that cash to cover losses and legal fees.

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Author: Dr Timothy O’Leary, Lecturer in Construction and Property, University of Melbourne