The Building Regulations Blog

The BCA and Section 28 of the Victorian OH&S Act 2004

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How do you identify where you cannot rely on the BCA as a published technical standard to comply  with your S28 duty as a designer? We need to start by looking at the two legislative frameworks.

Section 28 of the Victorian Occupational Health Safety Act 2004 creates a duty for designers to “ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, that it is designed to be safe and without risks to the health of persons using it as a workplace for a purpose for which it was designed.” The Building Code of Australia (BCA), applied in Victoria as the technical requirements of the Building Regulations 2006, provides minimum compliance standards for the health, safety, amenity, and energy efficiency of new buildings and alterations to existing buildings in our community.

The Building Code of Australia can address a significant proportion of the designer’s duty under S28 where the designer can rely on the BCA as a published technical standard that provides risk controls that eliminate or reduce the level of risk in that building to an acceptable level. The issue for designers is that there is an area of health and safety requirements where there is no duplication between the two legislative frameworks. This leaves the designer exposed and possibly unaware that they have not satisfied their OH&S duty. So how do we identify this area where the overlap occurs?

The overlap for requirements for health and safety occurs where buildings fall outside the generic requirements for the characterisation of buildings in the BCS Deemed to Satisfy (DTS) provisions. How do you know as a designer when the provisions for health and safety in your building are possibly not adequately covered by the BCA DTS provisions?

A detailed analysis is beyond the scope of this blog post, but let’s look at some rules of thumb where you need to have regard for where the BCA does not address your OH&S duty as a “published technical standard”. These could include:

• Class 7b (storage) and 8 (production) buildings where the nature of the storage or hazardous process is outside what the BCA DTS provisions normally cover (Remember they are generic and were first published in 1986 – they have not changed much since then!)
• Buildings which would not normally be considered works places, but have unusual features which make them likely to be a workplace e.g. a dwelling or residence with an area of very high ceilings requiring access equipment for maintenance.
• Unusual buildings not anticipated in the BCA e.g. Aircraft control towers or Spray Milk Drying Plant towers.
• Buildings with mixtures of alternative solutions and DTS to satisfy the performance requirements.

Now that we have identified some possible types of buildings where you might need to do more to address your S28 duty how are you going to address that duty? Your best starting point is AS/NZS ISO 31000:2009. Let’s simplify it a bit for this blog post. You need to identify and document:

• How the building is occupied and used e.g. who is in it? what are they doing?;
• The nature of the building e.g. it’s construction etc.
• The hazards that arise from the use and activities e.g. things that might cause injury, harm or worse!
• The level of risk that results from those hazards;
• The risk controls that might be used to eliminate or reduce those hazards
• How this is all going to be successfully implemented, communicated to the occupants and then monitored for compliance.

This is only a brief summary of the process,  not surprisingly it’s actually similar to the process you might use for documenting an alternative solution for compliance with the performance requirements in the BCA. For more information have a look at the Victorian WorkCover Authority website – they have a publication Designing Safer Buildings and Structures which is a useful reference.

Tags: BCA, Building Regulations 2006, Occupational Health and Safety Act 2004, OH&S, S28, Section 28

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 9th, 2010 at 11:09 pm and is filed under BCA, Building Regulations, Legislation, OH&S. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.