The National Construction Code (NCC) is an initiative of the Council of Australian Governments (COAG), with the purpose of combining all on-site building and plumbing requirements into a single nationwide code. The NCC sets the minimum requirements for the design, construction and performance of buildings throughout Australia.

BBS won a competitive tender in 2016 to undertake the first stage of the project – the National Construction Code Readability Pilot Project – the purpose of which was to make recommendations of ways to standardise the NCC for readability, language and format. The ultimate goal was to improve adherence to the NCC by improving accessibility and understanding to the information contained within.

BBS’ team of content writers undertook extensive research and engaged with subject matter experts in order to gain a deep understanding of the NCC and best-practice in similar documents around the world. We created ‘20 principles of readability’ which were ultimately endorsed by all stakeholders and then became central to the rewriting of the NCC.

With the agreement to the document framework and approach to content presentation, we moved to the second stage which involved the progressive editing (and in some instances, rewriting) of the NCC. Inbuilt into this process was an engagement program within the Australian Building and Construction Board and State-based NCC Stakeholders. The new NCC has been progressively rolled out to market stakeholders and has received highly positive feedback about its usability and clarity.