The pause in NCC reform will give industry the time needed to incorporate the compliance changes brought in since 2022, and most importantly, absorb the cost impacts to business.
Unfortunately, as everyone is all too aware, cost impacts mean increased house prices as an unavoidable consequence. For this reason, we would recommend holding off any remaining proposed NCC changes that materially increase costs (bar for safety), until the NCC process is re-designed.
It is important for the NCC process to balance the fundamental necessity for quality and safety with housing affordability and practicality of implementation (practicality).
This means making some straightforward but important changes to the NCC process including:
- More & Better Impact Assessment – All NCC changes should have a thorough cost/benefit analysis on impactsincorporating industry data/views.
- Affordability & practicality must be maximised with all NCC changes on an “if not why not” basis – If affordability or practicality is compromised, we must agree why NCC change is needed or delete the change.
- The NCC model must be flexible to adjust for complexity of NCC changes– always maximise practicality of implementation and housing affordability, with longer implementation periods or staged amendments:
- Affordability
- Practicality of Reform
- Timeliness of cycles
- Industry Stakeholder Roundtables – Developers and constructors must be more comprehensively consulted on affordability, practicality and timeliness – there must be checkpoints in the process to ensure the issues are properly addressed with industry.
- Coordination with states and territories is critical on NCC rollout and compliance variations across states & territories should be minimised to reduce complexity using the principles in items 2 & 3.