The Australian Building Regulation and Work Health Safety Compliance

Building regulation compliance is important in the practice of construction to ensure safety among building occupants, the people around the work site, as well as the builders themselves. Ensuring optimum building performance is the integral goal of every construction project. And in order to obtain this, standards are imposed on designers under the Work Health & Safety legislation.

The structural integrity of a building can be measured not only by the quality of the building materials used to construct it, but also the performance of duties by the designer of the structure and the person who commissions the construction work.

Based on the Model Work Health and Safety Regulations released by Safe Work Australia, here are some duties needed to be fulfilled by designers and persons commissioning the construction project:

1. The person who commissions work must consult with the designer. This states that the person behind the construction of a structure must be transparent in communicating with the designer about measures on how to ensure risks to health and safety due to the ongoing construction are minimised if not eliminated. The person behind the construction must give the designer any information they have in relation to precautions, hazards and risks at the workplace.

2. The designer must give safety reports to the person commissioning the design. This means that the designated designer of the building must give a written report to the person who commissioned the design regarding hazards relating to the design of the structure. This is to ensure that the person behind the construction of the project is aware of that the project has risks to the safety and health of the construction workers and that they are only associated with the particular design and not with other designs of the same type of structure.