NSW Building Commissioner putting the frighteners on developers, and their certifiers
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- Published: Wednesday, 28 July 2021 10:49
If you go to the Office of the NSW Building Commissioner’s website, you will see a pretty bold call that they are “Leading a once-in-a-generation reform of the design and building industry”. Considering the Office has been operating for only two years, with a handful of staff to start, their action and achievements so far are most impressive.
We’re always very interested in who was the Private Certifier for these jobs, something not easily found but normally known to our members as building certifiers in the relevant council area. As a plea, first of all, we’d be delighted to hear who the certifier was every time we hear the news of stop work or prohibition orders. Please let us know.
We don’t have a contact in the Office of the NSW Building Commissioner, we have no information at all about who works there, how they operate on site, whether they are ex-employees of local government and therefore probably, once upon a time, members of ours, how many of them there are, or how many of them there will be.
If you know, or are connected, please let us know.
If you click at the top of the page on the right-hand side on “Stop work, prohibition and rectification orders” you are taken to a clear demonstration of the Commissioner’s power to stop work, stop occupation certificates from being issued, or order rectification work to be done, in residential apartment buildings.
As a summary, there’s been only one Stop Work Order, on 8 July 2021 at Bellevue Hill, so someone at Woollahra could tell us about that.
There have been eight Prohibition orders since December 2020 covering Mascot (Bayside Council), Lindfield (Ku-ring-gai Council), Auburn (Cumberland), Asquith (Hornsby), Castle Hill (The Hills), Bellevue Hill (the same development where a stop work order was issued - Woollahra), Manly Vale (Northern Beaches) and Parramatta (Parramatta City).
There have been thirteen Building work rectification orders since November 2020, in the areas of the councils listed above.
And one Enforceable Undertaking only last week in Castle Hill that, according to the SMH on 27 July (and prompted this article) reported on the Building Commissioner settling with the developer by providing an $11 million safety fund for faults, independent engineering monitoring of the basement for 10 years and the development’s owners’ corporation to receive a twenty year structural guarantee and a ten year commitment to rectify and pay for defects”.
Good job. Imagine what they could do with twice the staff.