To help deliver a more user-friendly, modern and accessible National Construction Code (NCC) to all practitioners, the Australian Building Codes Board (ABCB) has made some significant changes for NCC 2022.
To ensure the structure is consistent across all Volumes of NCC 2022, the structure of Volumes One and Three will remain with slight amendments to Volume Two. These changes will mostly relate to Section Three, which will be relocated into its own publication, ABCB Housing Provisions. This publication will contain Acceptable Construction Practices (ACP) content consisting of twelve chapters and will reflect the parts, which currently frame Section Three of Volume Two in their existing order. Volume Two, Section One will remain unchanged and Section Two will remain consistent with Volume One and Volume Three as it will now contain Performance and Deemed-to-Satisfy Solutions (DTS).
The Acceptable Construction Manual (ACM) content will be unchanged, allowing building professions to choose between ACM and ACP when both available. However, DTS Solutions will now refer to the ABCB Housing Provisions or relevant Australian Standards.
A new referencing system has also been developed to maintain consistency across the entire code, along with making it digitally innovative and easier to understand. The new system is called Section, Part, Type and Clause (SPTC) and preserves as much of the current referencing system as possible, while closely reflecting the structure of the code.
To ensure consistency, the referencing system in Volume Two will be aligned with the system used in Volume One and Three. To do this, Section H (special use buildings) in Volume One will now become Section I, Volume One. This means Section H can now be assigned to Volume Two making it easier to distinguish between Volume One and Volume Two. To help practitioners transition to this new system, NCC 2022 will include NCC 2019 referencing alongside the new SPTC referencing.
With the first draft of NCC 2022 now released for public comment, the Technical Services team at Kingspan Insulation are on hand to answer any queries regarding the new National Construction Code.
