BCA Consulting

We provide a strategic assessment of your DA plans to ensure the design is fundamentally sound. This statement gives you and Council the confidence to move forward and demonstrates project viability. By identifying BCA compliance hurdles early, we minimise the risk of future Section 4.55 modifications, costly deviations that can halt your schedule and force a full re-submission to Council.

The goal is that your project moves from planning to construction without going backwards.

A detailed analysis of architectural plans against the prescriptive requirements of the BCA. We provide clear advice on compliance with the Deemed-to-Satisfy provisions, and deliver a definitive report, allowing you to proceed to the Construction Certificate stage with confidence and precision.

The report tells you where the design complies and where it does not, in terms your architect and engineer can act on.

Commission it as early as you can, and ideally before the Development Application is lodged. Construction Certificate stage is too late to be finding these things. Resolving the Building Code matters before the DA goes in is what keeps a Section 4.55 modification off the table.

When a prescriptive requirement is impractical or cost-prohibitive, a Performance Solution achieves the same safety outcome by a different route. Two separate roles are involved, and they cannot be held by the same person on the same project.

Preparing the solution. A consultant engaged by the owner or builder does the analysis and signs the report: a fire safety engineer, an access consultant, or a facade or weatherproofing specialist. They own the design and the analysis.

Assessing and approving it. That is the certifier's role. We check the report genuinely meets the NCC Performance Requirements, question the assumptions, ask for changes, and accept it into the approved design once we are satisfied. Where the solution concerns fire safety, we manage the Fire and Rescue NSW referral. The certifier owns the decision to approve.

A certifier cannot do both on the same job, because that would mean approving their own design. Keeping the roles apart is what makes the approval mean anything.

Where we sit. On projects we are certifying, we assess and approve the performance solutions your consultants prepare, and manage the Fire and Rescue NSW referral where fire safety is involved. On projects certified by someone else, we can be engaged to prepare non-fire performance solutions such as ceiling heights, natural light, weatherproofing and thresholds. Fire engineered solutions are always prepared by a fire engineer.

Recent work includes fire safety performance solutions for a new motel built alongside an operating club, covering fire separation and an existing main switchboard, and a fire engineered solution for a greenhouse of roughly 19,600sqm on bushfire-prone land. Both went through Fire and Rescue NSW referral.

We have also assessed the bushfire performance solution pathway under NCC Part G5 for a special fire protection purpose building, alongside performance solutions for weatherproofing and disabled access.

Most projects use the Deemed-to-Satisfy provisions, the prescriptive route, because it is faster and cheaper when the design fits it. A Performance Solution is worth the extra work when the prescriptive requirement would force a design change you do not want, or a cost the project cannot carry.

We assess which of the two your project needs before you commit to either, because doing that the other way round is how budgets get spent twice.