So I'm going to go through 20 lessons in 20 minutes, if I can, that's come out of the cladding rectification program.
The first lesson is that partnerships between state and local government actually can work, despite what everyone says, they actually can work and in this case under the cladding rectification program they have worked. So 1657 apartment buildings or Class 2 buildings have been, the I suppose, the problem set that we have focused on throughout the last 6 years and, can I say, we are, at the, by the end of this month, we'll be at the 90% mark of resolving these buildings that could only occur if there was an alignment of purpose and that alignment of purpose is lesson 2.
That the state government has a responsibility in any crisis to be clear and set a clear and a precise direction. We did that through Ministerial Guideline 15. Really Ministerial Guideline 15 set out the risk thresholds what was allowable, what cladding was allowed, combustible cladding was allowed to be on buildings. It's a culmination of about 3 years research and it didn't come overnight, but once we got that into place it's been picked up across 30 municipalities and has enabled us not only to resolve 90% of the buildings, but also around about 92% of those 90% we've been able to take the building notices off, so enforcement action has been able to come off, which I think is really, really, really important. You couldn't get there without lesson 3.
You know any organisation, when dealing with a crisis, needs to be able to build an evidence base and we did that deliberately and very thoroughly with a partnership through RMIT and CSRO's data 61. We're able to start to answer the unanswered questions. We did a lot of testing in laboratories about what product performed in what way. So, we became the expert. We developed a risk engineering approach and we were able to apply that risk engineering principles across those buildings. And again, that's codified in Ministerial Guideline 15. But to do that, you have to set up an organisation that builds knowledge and evolves.
So, lesson 4, and one of the things that I'm proudest of is, that we drew in a lot of knowledge from experts in the early days. Experts going out there and finding out what cladding risk really looked like. We went to laboratories, we did a lot of a lot of destructive works to make sure that we knew what was behind the cladding and other things. We got to understand the built environment very, very, very clearly and we brought those knowledge, that knowledge back into inside the organisation, and but so by the end of the 6 years, we were able to develop a really, really clear understanding of the problem and the problems. If we, if you know the problems, you can start to develop solutions and start to apply the principles that we did through Ministerial Guideline 15, we developed our in-house costing models, became much more precise in our understanding of cost to rectification than the quantity surveyors that we had in the initial phase. All the knowledge we internalised, and we were able to apply to the problem. As I say, one of the things and one of the clear messages I want to give here today, is we got that knowledge, we captured that knowledge. We had the most comprehensive set of building records I think ever compiled. Class 2 buildings. We looked at it very, very closely and to see what went wrong, right, how did this happen and what we found is the building permit system that we spoke about earlier, I think Steve Baxter spoke about earlier, the importance of that, it's been honoured in the breach and we need to get a lot better. 75% of the times, despite the urban myth, 75% of the time, the cladding was specified by the designers. Where there should have been a performance engineering solution by fire engineers, that only occurred in 15% of the time, right? 100% of the time, the relevant building surveyor approved the project and I think if we want to have be genuine about getting effective regulation, we have to follow the building permit process, right, it's a critical learning of this, at the moment it's been honoured in the breach.
We also developed a real understanding of what, you know, how builders of class 2 buildings were performing, and we found that 1 in 2 buildings is highly defective, predominantly leaking, right, and I think this gives us a great clue. We know that the water or leaky buildings is probably a bigger risk than the cladding, okay, and we know we've got to do better around it. That means weather proofing, waterproofing, making sure our designs have enough detail in them so that a builder can build properly, all right, and that's what we're sort of lacking at the moment. That this is a really important learning out of this project, we've got to focus on this stage and I'll talk a little bit more about the importance of design tech.
Lesson 7, if you want to know what the buildings, the building type with the most defects, it's this one over here. All right, that's around, it's a 3-story or 4-story building, could be 3 or 4-story. It's located 15 or 30ks from Melbourne. This is a type, I'm not saying this is just this building, although this is a really bad building. It's 3, as I say, 3 or 4-stories, it's about 10 years old, right, this one, it's a lightweight facade on timber frame, exposed timber constructed balconies, right, that's a really important feature of them. Sections of flat roof, the builder in terms of profile, the builder is the developer, right? Majority of the owners are owner-investors, they're not owner occupiers. The builder-developer still holds a certain percentage of the apartments, enables him to influence the owners corporation and you effectively have a dysfunctional owners corporation. All right, these are the common characteristics of the worst buildings that we found, all right so again, this gives us a clue as to what we should be looking at post occupancy but also preoccupancy, right, because these are the vulnerable buildings.
Lesson 8, design details matter, right. We're doing a lot of work of this at the moment, and I think this, we'll release this probably early next year, but we're looking at the design details of the buildings that we have in our problem set, right? We're looking at it very closely and we're matching that up against the defects that we've observed and what we're finding very clearly is that the absence of design detail leads to defects, okay, and here you've got one, this is an external wall detail, but you can see there is no detail whatsoever when the external vertical hits the horizontal. So, in other words, there's no detail about weather proofing, flashing, or fall. Okay. So the middle photo shows you that in this particular building, you got a lot of moisture creeping in and the one closest to me is the design detail of the remediation. You can see how much more detail that is? We should be looking for the detail before these things get signed off, you need to look at the detail. You can't blame builders if they haven't been given the detail. Right? So, design is critical.
Right, lesson 9. We have another piece of research that we are currently doing is around essential safety measures. Good news is they seem to be working, but the question is why and how? Not so sure. Right. So, the wet systems appear to be functioning, but no building survey, to date, of the buildings that we're looking at, had all the relevant documentation available. Maintenance documentation log books are often not available on site or very difficult to locate. Sometimes it's captured in proprietorial system, software systems that's only the actual contractor can deal with. And I think the most important thing out of this one is the ESM 5-year milestone test which is a, it's a fairly full-on test and it's costly, it's not happening, right. So, owners corporation often change contractors before that happens, probably at the behest of their owners corporation manager, right, as a way to save money. That's really important, okay, from our understanding if ESMs aren't working, you don't have a safe building. In terms of the passive systems, we've seen a lot of issues around the passive systems that are documented in performance solutions not there or not there any longer, and the mechanical systems, that are supposed to support, aren't functioning. Right?
So what's a good building look like? I think it's pretty simple, right? Detailed designs are critical part of it, right? That those designers have to be on the hook and they have to provide the detail. Secondly, you know, a good registered solvent builder faithfully interpreting those detailed designs is an absolute critical element as we all know. But the other element which we don't focus on enough, and I haven't heard much of it today, is about good maintenance regime, right, in Class 2 buildings it's not happening, okay, and I'll get on to that in a tick, with respect to the owners corporation, you know owners must take responsibility. So buildings can deteriorate rapidly over the first 5 years if they aren't maintained and keeping owners on the hook around their responsibilities I think is a really important part of the regulation going forward, our regulatory scheme going forward. It can't all be on the builder, right? Or the or the inspector's preoccupancy, right? It's got to be some work done working with owners corporation to get good maintenance regimes in place.
Now, Skye mentioned this earlier about the importance of quality assurance regime, for our program we introduced the, re-introduced the Clerk of Works, and in summary that had about a 700% return on investment, right, based on the work that we've done, we've published that, we published that in research paper number 2. It's a really important thing. The Clerk of Works was 5 visits per fortnight to a building and we saw the enormous uplift in quality of the builders in terms of their processes, their understandings about quality and safety, throughout the program, so those contractors were upskilled through the Clerk of Works. I don't know how you create an economic incentive to get the Clerk of Works back into place, but it does yield a huge return, right? A huge return on investment, and it did for us and I'm glad we had it, makes me sleep at night.
Well, I mentioned this just briefly before, and lesson 12 and lesson 13 along the same lines. Strata ownership is difficult. Right? So, we we've had 70 over 78,000 meaningful interactions with owners corporations throughout the life of this program, and they're not just meet and greets, they’re problem solving conversations, right? Trying to deal with their building, what they've inherited most of the time, and the despair that that they face when they realise that they're living in a very, very ordinary building is palpable. Many, many distressing stories, and they're not equipped for it. Right? So, one of the things I'm glad the owners corporation act is under review at the moment because I think we need to start to focus on this this area. One thing for sure is - I don't know if anyone saw this episode of Four Corners - if you haven't you've got to see it. If you're interested in the built environment, you've got to see this, it’s the Strata Trap. It really, really exposed the underbelly and the precarious position owners corporations are placed when they're at the behest of an owners corporation manager and all the conflicts of interest that take place and they become very susceptible to so-called building experts, right? I think Keith mentioned those earlier on. So, they flock around these buildings like you wouldn't believe and, really, aren't really offering that much, not much at all.
That's why I say, you know, beware the expert, right? Because they come to these buildings all the time and particularly in a crisis, you know, they really do they really come out of the woodwork. Feed them and they'll flourish, and I think as a state government, we've got to start asking questions about are they really experts or not? And we've seen that, I think I've seen that from lawyers, to some building practitioners, to fire engineers and others just really, really mobilise around a problem, not to solve it but to make money.
Right, Lesson 15. Don't get sucked in by the myths, gather the evidence. There's a lot of myths in the early days, you know in the early days we were told that, you know, it was all about product substitution, it was all the responsibility of the dodgy builder, we heard a lot of them. None of them turned out to be true, or only if they did, they were only partially true. But the more technical issues, right? And we had a number here also need to be chased down. One of the myths was that the combustible insulation causes as much issue as the cladding. Well, we did the testing on it, that's not right. Right. It has a short, sharp energy release, it's not great, but it's had a short sharp energy release. It doesn't contribute to the overall fire spread too much at all. Another one, I think, the second one is a really important one. Conpolcrete or cement based EPS was a much safer product than people sort of were feared at the time and a good manufacturer in Victoria went bust because it was deemed an non-acceptable product. We did the testing and with the VBA at the time, and we proved that it was a very low combustible product. And then the last one we do is around ACP FR, where you should measure it by its polyethylene, the assumption was always you measure it by the polyethylene content, but it turns out really it's about the ratio between the fire retardant and the polyethylene, and that's changing the nature of the way insurers deal with it.
Lesson 16, the cost of construction is not just about materials and wages, we've heard that a bit over time, you know, it's all about the CFMEU or it's all about, sort of, you know high product costs. Well, actually, you know, a fair bit of problem starts at local government, right? The cost of the pre-works permitting is one thing, and that was you know, they've collected over $10 million of our money on projects in local government areas, but it's more to do with the fact that it's an inconsistency with the way they charge their permit fees and the time it takes for them to do it. So, we've estimated on our projects about 47% of the total project time is taken up in the pre-permit phase. We've got to do better, right? So, I reckon that's really important.
Lesson 17, lots of inconsistencies to think through still. The building furthest out, so the right-hand side there, that's about 1000 square meters of EPS under construction in 2021, right? The building next to it is a Class 2 building 3, 2-stories over car park, right? Two-stories over car park. So, the building on the left, my left, is the non-compliant building, building on the right is a Class 1A, all right. So, I would have thought most of the risk sits in that one there, it's 1000 square meters of EPS on it, but it's compliant.
Lesson 18, there are many risks that need to be weighed up, and this one of the other things I think from a government program we need to look at this, one I wish we had have lanced early is that, you know risk, there's risk of cladding risk, and some of that is fictional or you have to have a really, you know, big imagination for some of it, but the risk of trying to take it off is real, right? So, we had an incident only about 6 or 7 weeks ago where a panel slipped from its tether and crashed on a table, if it had have been in the summer months, it would have been a fatality, right? It just so happens it wasn't. Another building that we've had to work on, again, I think with a risk that was questionable, and there's a lot of debates around this one, so I'll accept that I lost, that we lost the debate, and we went ahead and took the cladding off. But you can see this, the ability to set up in a very busy corner there, of traffic, where you couldn't set up any scaffold, it was just too close to the road. So, it’s very dangerous and that's the one job that I felt time and time again that we were going to have a have a problem on. We got through it and that they did well, but it was a risky project.
Lesson 19, I think is really, really important, is to listen and learn with other jurisdictions. Not a hell of a lot else is happening in the combustible cladding space in Australia, so we went overseas and dealt with the UK, Scotland and Ireland and really forged a fantastic relationship and got a lot a lot of learnings from them and we also, I think, shared a fair bit of our success which they're still very interested in.
Lesson 20 and the last one, and I got one minute 24. Silence changes nothing. Right. So, we've published everything. So, we've got more publications to come on this. There'll be one not undertaken by CSV, but undertaken by Bronwyn Weir when we're into fire engineering, and that'll be out shortly and there's other ones that I've mentioned. But I think it's a really important thing, so when people stop listening, they can read something and I think we've documented it, we'll continue to document till we finish.
That's all from me. So, thank you for listening.