The NSW Design and Building Practitioners Framework

About this course.

New South Wales overhauled building regulation because public confidence in the quality of new buildings — particularly residential apartment buildings — had fallen sharply, and the existing system was not reliably preventing or catching serious defects. High-profile problems in apartment towers, widespread reports of defects in newly completed strata buildings, and the sense that no single accountable person stood behind the design and construction of a building combined to create a "building-confidence" problem. The government's response was to introduce a framework that makes key practitioners register, take individual responsibility for their work through declarations, and be subject to a dedicated regulator with strong powers. This module explains that background so the rest of the framework makes sense.

For many years, the way buildings were designed, documented and certified in NSW allowed responsibility to become diffuse. On a complex project, dozens of designers, sub-consultants, trades and suppliers each contributed part of the whole, and the documentation that was approved for a development application or construction certificate was not always the documentation that was actually built. Variations, substitutions and "design development" during construction meant the finished building could differ from what had been assessed, and it was often unclear who — if anyone — had checked that the building as constructed actually complied with the relevant requirements. When defects later emerged, owners frequently found it very difficult to identify a responsible party, and the cost of rectification fell on them.