Kim Lovegrove
Honorary Consul Kim Lovegrove MSE RML, FAIB is the Chairman of the International Building Quality Centre and Senior Consultant to the World Bank in which capacity he is engaged as a building regulatory law reformer in a number of countries around the world. Kim is a past Conjoint Professor in building regulations and has been at the vanguard of construction law and law reform for years. He has headed up teams and consultancies at State, National and inter jurisdictional level and has chaired and/or spoken at numerous conferences on various law reform topics.
In the early 90s, Lovegrove led a team that generated the Australian National Model Building Act, which became the law reform template for modern day building control in most Australian jurisdictions. In the late 90s, he was invited by Lord Tony Baldry, the then chairman of the English Forum for Construction Law Reform, to address the forum at a venue at the House of Commons on the said law reform initiative and world’s best practice building control. In 1997 and 2013 he was invited to participate in a building law reform think tank by the team that was charged with carriage of the reform to the Japanese Building Act in Tokyo. He was the sole antipodean representative invited to participate in the regulatory review think tank. Kim Lovegrove has an international reputation for world’s best practice and holistic building regulatory law reform. More recently, he was deployed in an advisory capacity by the World Bank in China.
He has played a key role in several major Australian law reform initiatives including:
Practitioner Registration and Probity Regimes
The National Model Building Act is the “regulatory blueprint” for the establishment of a registration system for building practitioners in Australia. The Model was applied “to the letter” in Victoria and the Northern Territory to register all building practitioners.
Building Approval and Enforcement Regimes
The National Model Building Act, once promulgated by a number of Australian states and territories, established a new building approval and permit delivery system providing faster and better compliance.
Liability Reform
Kim contributed to the introduction of proportionate liability and the removal of joint and several liability in the building industry in Australia.
10 Year Liability Capping
The “liabilities decennial” approach, a French-based 10-year liability capping concept, was imported to Australia to establish a clear start and completion date for the initiation and conclusion of legal proceedings. Lovegrove’s team along with fellow civil servants, drove the establishment of systems of compulsory insurance for building industry practitioners to improve consumer protection and practitioner solvency.
Other projects:
· National Model Building Act (early 1990s); Japanese government, law reform think tank (mid 1990s); Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979 NSW, (late 1990s)
· The Building Act 1993, Victoria (early 1990s and 2007); Reviewing Mumbai Building Regulations (2016/17); reviewing Construction Insurance Proposal for New Delhi (2016/17)
· World Bank forum, Washington DC, on lessons learned (2016)
Links:
