So it's been a little over a year since I was appointed as a State Building surveyor and a lot of certainly happened in that time, in such a short amount of time.
So here's some of the highlights in the first 12 months of the job.
So first of all, attraction and retention of building surveyors.
So the office of the State Building Surveyor has been engaging with stakeholders and government to address the continued shortage of of building surveyors in our industry.
It's an issue that poses ongoing risk to the viability and delivery of building control functions in Victoria.
So we launched the Building Surveyor Pathway program, which so far has placed five building surveyors in industry with host organisations since May this year.
So it's only the start, but we've managed to place 5 already.
We're also promoting building surveyors a career pathway through our website, Career Expose and attending school engagements as well high school engagements.
And we're working closely with RMIT in the development of new courses for building surveyors.
And I've established 3 new graduate roles within my office, the Office of the State Building Surveyor.
And these are now filled and recruited.
So these graduates are on a fixed term 2 year program and I'll go out to industry at the end of that program.
And that program continues in perpetuity.
So more support for Victorian councils.
So councils play a very important role in building control, not only for new buildings, but primarily with existing buildings.
Keeping existing buildings safe and compliant for occupants, for their, for their, for the life of those buildings is not an easy feat.
So my office is now, my office now has a dedicated team of experienced building surveyors who engage directly with councils and municipal building surveyors to support them with their building control functions.
This work reflects one of my functions in the ACT.
It's a new function that's in the act and I'll talk a little bit more about that in detail later on.
We're also supporting the Mornington Peninsula Shire.
With the devastating McCray landslides in January required swift action.
My office assisted with the recruitment of an interim municipal building surveyor and offered guidance to the Morning Peninsula Shire building team and assisted them with enforcement processes as they were playing out in real time.
So that was an that was a time where we really had to act quickly and jump in and assist where we can, where we could.
The Board of Inquiry has just made its report public in the last few days and a little later today we're going to hear from Kelly Grigsby, CEO of MIV.
He will talk a little bit about those findings also working on new on the new legislative framework.
And I just spoke about that these reforms will give the BPC some new powers.
And we spoke, you heard from Anna about rectification orders, new developer bonds and 1st resort insurance.
So my office is working really hard on these, on with the various departments across the BPC and the Department of Transport and Planning, planning and industry stakeholders on the implementation of these reforms.
The implementation is key to its success.
My role is to ensure that all practitioners understand what's expected of them.
My team has completed the development of the municipal building control plans.
I spoke about those earlier.
The pilot program has just been completed and all councils are expected to prepare and complete those plans in December.
And I'll go into a little bit more detail.
So in addition to all of this, over the past 12 months, I've engaged extensively across industry.
I've attended as many meetings, conferences, award nights, industry meetings across Victoria.
Many of you reached out to me for assistance and for clarity and I hope I've been able to assist you and provide that to your satisfaction.
I've assisted and of course, and the BPC to fulfill its functions more importantly.
So there's no doubt that in the last 12 months, it's been really busy and an exciting time for our industry as we are embarking on reforms that are really, really long overdue.
And many of you probably agree with that.
I'm particularly grateful to all of you and our industry stakeholders who have continued to advocate for building surveyors for plumbers and for builders across Victoria and have provided me with frank and fearless, you know, advice and, and also suggestions about how we can improve this industry.
I look forward to continuing to provide you with with advice and leadership as the expertise in my office continues to grow.
So my other focus in the last 12 months has been to completely restructure my office.
So having the right industry people is crucial to my success and to to the success of our industry.
So the new structure that's been designed to deliver has been designed to deliver on the legislative functions that now appear in the act.
So this has resulted in 24 vacant positions that have almost now all been filled.
So I'll take you through some of that now.
So I'm very proud to announce a few of these appointments.
There are 49 positions in my new structure and what you see on the screen represents the senior leadership team who are here today.
I'll talk a little bit about each of those.
So I'm supported by the Deputy State Building Surveyor, Jo Van Loon, who's sitting over here in the front, and Kerry Holmes, who many of you will all know from left to right.
I'm pleased to announce the recruitment of my senior head roles.
So first, I'm going to introduce Will Babington.
He commenced on the 25th of August and some of you would have already heard from him.
So Will has recently been the chief data analyst for Salvation Army.
His skill set alliance strongly with the goals of my office and he leads a team that supports the operation of my office.
He's also a board member of the of the Institute of Public Administration Victoria and has held senior advisory roles across state and local government.
My new structure separates building and plumbing.
So they as they both desire, they both deserve particular attention.
So next, the head of plumbing, Paul Galvin, who's here today.
He commenced with us only last week.
He's been here for for a week so far.
Paul has a strong background in plumbing, construction and the water industry.
Come into the office of the State Building Surveyor from South East Water, where he spent the last 9 years managing a number of areas including compliance and inspection, new connections to water and sewer, and contract development and management for large water projects.
Paul's been in the plumbing industry for over 30 years and has represented the water industry on the ABCB Plumbing Codes Committee as well.
So a lot of you may have had something to do with him when he was doing that.
Next head of building, Paul Bailey, he commenced on the 29th of September, so he's been with us for a couple of weeks now.
Many of you know Paul, he's a quite a notable person in our industry.
He's got 35 years of experience as a building surveyor.
He's held senior positions with BSGM and with the Hendry Group and he's managed large teams of building surveys.
He has a broad range of experience across his career developing and refining parts of the BCA in his time on the ABC Board in Canberra, and he's also spent six years on the Building Appeals Board as well as a board member.
And finally the Head of Technical Strategy, Matt Waters. Many of you will know Matt.
He's been with the VBA and BPC for six years and has 15 years’ experience in the permanent space codes and standards.
Matt's area focus in this new structure is on building reform.
He works closely with the Department of Transport and Planning, the IBCB and Standards Australia, representing the views of the Office of the State Building Surveyor.
So as I said earlier, the remainder of the team's almost completely recruited.
I'll make further announcements about that as that happens.
So I'll cover off in a bit more detailed municipal building control plans.
I have a statutory function that requires me to monitor and advise councils and support councils on the performance of their building control functions.
The Victorian Government's Expert Panel Stage 1 report recommended the requirement for councils to complete a municipal building control plan and have one of those in place at all times.
My team has now completed the development of these plans for local government and they were developed in conjunction with the Victoria Municipal Building Surveyors Group.
So municipal building control plans are designed to provide guidance to Victorian councils to help them plan and deliver the building control functions and collect relevant information about building control activity.
So these plans support councils by providing guidance on risk management, workforce planning, resources and compliance enforcement.
The plan's second purpose is to collect valuable data on how councils are delivering their building control functions.
This will happen through monthly reporting.
So it's hoped that over time, building control will be administered across local government in a far more consistent way.
The pilot program was completed in September.
There were 35 councils that that participated in that pilot program and 19 of those councils completed the plans and returned a draft plan.
So these we received a lot of feedback from this pilot program and we incorporated changes into completing a final plan.
So the next step is to roll out the plans to all 79 councils and that's happening right now with a view of having those plans completed by December this year and reporting commencing from January 2026.
So we'll be using the data collected to establish a statewide baseline on how municipal building control functions have been delivered and administered.
So this will give us for the first time a clear picture of sector wide strengths, challenges and opportunities for improvement.
So next, I want to take you through some analysis.
So as you know, the current building permit system in Victoria was introduced on the 1st of July in 1994.
So the integrity of our building permit system is vital to the quality, the build quality and outcome of buildings in Victoria.
It's also vitally important that all players are carrying out their work to the high standards and in compliance with legislation.
So I'm now going to give you a very brief update on some of the work that I'm doing analyzing some datas on building surveyors, building inspections, building inspectors, sorry, building permits and inspectors and inspections themselves.
So the analysis looks at BAMS data over a two year period from July 23 to July 25. New AI analytical tools have made it possible to carry out this analysis in a far more sophisticated way.
In this example that you see on screen, the data that I've analysed shows that the top five building surveys and inspectors who are carrying out the highest number of mandatory inspections on a single day average 54.
Now this clearly calls in question the quality of the inspections or in fact if there's inspection inspections ever got carried out at all.
So it's important that we better understand this data and what the data is telling us is going on here.
So whilst these are outliers, it's important that we look into this more closely.
Next, I've conducted a further deep dive analysis to understand the spread of inspections.
So in this example, you see on screen Surveyor X, who's a real surveyor on 2 occasions on the date shown on screen reported they conducted 66 and 61 inspections respectively on a single day and that these inspections had a 100% password.
So this is what the data is showing us.
We're also able to plot the locations of these inspections because we also have this data.
So as you can see from the 2 maps on screen, the inspections spanned a massive geographic area.
So it calls into question again, did this inspections actually take place or is this a problem with the data?
So just for context, you all know that inspections can only be carried out by persons prescribed by the regulations and the inspections have to be carried out in person by those people.
I just want to put that context in place because it, it sort of highlights how ridiculous this data is.
So, so from the example you see here, it's important that we verify, you know, did this actually occur or, is this problem data?
So that's, that's really the next step for us.
So we need to determine if there's a if this is a case of poor data or poor practice.
And if it's a case of poor practice, of course we need to do something about it.
So in this example builder, this looks at builder and builder surveyor relationship.
So by way of context, 781-A and 78-B states that a builder must not appoint a private building surveyor to carry out domestic building work and the surveyor must not accept the appointment referred to by that builder.
So there's 2 breaches.
The builder can't appoint the building surveyor, the surveyor can't accept the appointment.
So the data shows the builder a constructed over 6000 homes in a two year.
And 2 building surveyors issued 81.6% of those permits.
So when we further analysed the inspections for that that that particular example, the two building surveyors approved 91.1% of inspections on the first guy.
In the second example, the building again constructed over 6000 homes in the same.
And two surveyors only issued 83.8% of the building permits.
So the data also shows dozens of examples where a single buildings, a single builder represents more than 85% of the building surveyors business.
So there's probably a dozen of those examples as well and probably another dozen that are getting close to the line.
So in my opinion, this doesn't comply, this practice doesn't comply with the provisions of 78 and all the intention of the act.
So these, so these inspections, look, I want to stress this, this is really important that these inspection that I've, I've spoken about are just a sample.
They're definitely outliers.
And when I did another cut of the, of the, of the data, when I removed the 20, I guess practitioners where these trends existed, the numbers start to look a little bit more encouraging.
So we found that the average number of inspections per day fell to 10 and the average pass rate fell to 56%, which feels about right to me.
So clearly, and the good news really is that the majority of people are doing the right thing, but where there's anomalies exist, it's incumbent on us to make sure that we investigate and that we, if we need to take whole people to account, we will.
And if the data is wrong, we need to correct it.
So turning insights into actions.
So the BPC will be doing this.
Firstly, the data needs to be properly verified.
This will include obtaining inspection records from building surveyors and actually auditing building surveyors.
This is the first step.
Second, the network's already underway.
Secondly, the BPSC will take any necessary action based on these findings.
So the building system in Victoria is entirely dependent on all players doing their job correctly.
This issue will be the focus in the foreseeable future while we work to implement all these additional powers and functions that Anna spoke about a moment ago.
The year ahead.
OK, so with a new, highly experienced team around me and a mandate to deliver on my key functions, we're going to be pretty busy for the next 12 months.
And there's a busy agenda.
So I'll just take you through a couple of things.
So we'll be relaunching the Practitioner Education series.
You may recall this existed about 18 months ago.
These are our long webinars that educate practitioners on requirements that affect their work.
These sessions provide technical guidance to practitioners.
These webinars have been very, very popular in the past and they've been really well attended and well received.
The practitioner education series will also be undergoing a facelift to help better engage with you and I'll provide more information about that in time.
So we're also in the process of completely revamping and delivering up to date practice notes to an industry, guidance to the building and plumbing practitioners and also exploring areas where binding determinations may be more appropriate.
Later this year, we'll be relaunching the new OSBS monthly newsletter.
It's a brand new newsletter.
It will come out every month.
It will provide up to date information about legislative changes, education opportunities, opportunities, guidance material and much, much more.
So keep an eye out for that.
We hope to launch that before year's end with increased staff levels.
We are also increasing our hours of operation for technical hotlines for building and plumbing practitioners.
In addition, we're reviewing how we can better service industry through the use of our enhanced technical abilities.
So my office will continue to engage closely with industry in the year ahead and you will see more representatives from my office at more industry events.
Thank you very much for having me here today and I hope you enjoyed the day.