A world-first global law for building defects

CIOB is supporting the world’s first “international model building act” that any country can use to develop robust laws that protect people and clients against dangerous and costly defects in buildings.

It’s designed to help countries seeking to improve their regulatory systems in the face of preventable building disasters, rapid urbanisation, or both – all while respecting national sovereignty and local context.

Called the International Model Building Act and published in February, it was developed by the International Building Quality Centre (IBQC), a group of international construction law and policy experts. IBQC is affiliated with universities around the world.

On the IBQC board are Dame Judith Hackitt, chair of the Independent Review of Building Regulations & Fire Safety, a report commissioned by the UK government after the Grenfell fire, and Stephanie Barwise KC, who represented bereaved families at the Grenfell Inquiry.

IBQC chair Professor Kim Lovegrove led the development of the Act. He’s been a senior law reform consultant for the World Bank. As project director for the Australian Model Building Act, he helped pioneer construction law reform in Australia in the 1990s.

Lovegrove told CM that the Act, drawn from good practice tested in countries around the world, can prevent harm arising when contractors are allowed to bypass the prescribed route to getting building consents but use that leeway to cut corners on safety.

“There’s been a very strong emphasis in the last decade on building codes, understandably, but there’s been an under-emphasis on the umbrella legislation that calls up the code,” he said.

“The performance-based code revolution gave applicants the discretion to not use the prescribed route to getting building consents. But often there isn’t the managerial or overarching regulatory infrastructure to ensure that the freedoms afforded by performance-based building codes are not abused.”

Accordingly, the Act emphasises risk classification first, moving from there to accountability, oversight, and enforcement.

“Good practice legislation is holistic, like a jigsaw puzzle,” Lovegrove said.

“If one component’s missing, you have an incomplete thesis. The World Bank promotes this kind of holistic legislation: a central government register, a licensing and registration regime – something that interests CIOB with its focus on professionalism.

“It promotes mandatory registration and licensing of key actors like engineers, architects, building surveyors and builders. It promotes strong competencies and central building control functions, where government and local government play a key inspectorial role.

“It’s irrefutable that robust building regulatory ecologies have very strong, independent peer review. This is what gives investors confidence.”

Lovegrove insisted the Act is not just for developing countries.

“When I look for international good practice, I look for jurisdictions where there hasn’t been building failure,” he said.

He said that excludes jurisdictions where, for instance, major fire events involving the rapid, vertical spread of fire leads to the tragic loss of life. Also excluded are jurisdictions where systemic defect crises such as widespread water-ingress failures have triggered multi-billion-dollar remediation programmes, exposing weaknesses in regulatory oversight and causing major economic and social costs.

These experiences, he said, show that even advanced economies are not immune to shortcomings in building control frameworks and may benefit from considering elements of the Model Act when reviewing their regulatory settings.

“We totally respect nations’ sovereignty in law, so we say just consider it, analyse it, look at it as a reference point,” he said. “They have the ultimate power to decide whether they want to have regard to it, to use any aspect of it, to use it holus bolus, or not, that’s their prerogative. But it has far more application than just emerging economies.”

Nevertheless, the value proposition for emerging economies is clear, said Lovegrove. It reduces drafting uncertainty, embeds international good practice and provides coherent accountability allocation. It also strengthens public safety while preserving market functionality.

“In short, it offers legislative scaffolding for jurisdictions seeking reform momentum without starting from first principles,” he said.

Where public confidence has eroded, governments often require a comprehensive legislative reset rather than incremental amendment. The Act provides a structured foundation for such recalibration.

Advanced Common-Law jurisdictions might not want to adopt the model wholesale. Here, the Act can help them evolve by refining risk-based classification, recalibrating enforcement and accountability architecture, and creating institutional independence models.

Isaac Ryan, CIOB’s government relations and policy manager in Australia, said the Act would help countries build public trust in the built environment.

“As a chartered professional body representing construction professionals worldwide, CIOB recognises that durable public trust in the built environment rests on two interdependent pillars: professional competence and coherent regulatory architecture,” he said.

“Professional standards establish capability and ethics, while legislative clarity establishes accountability and institutional integrity.”

Download the International Model Building Act here.