President’s Message

Greg North, President, NZ Chapter Society of Fire Protection Engineers, provides an update on SFPE activities and opportunities for members to get involved in the Society and in helping to shape the future of the sector.

There has been several highlights over the past year, with the SFPE and its members in the forefront of several exciting developments, including the fire safety review of the building code; development of the Design Guidance Note: Fire Engineering Design for New Zealand Public Hospitals and a companion document to the Fire Safe Use of Wood in Buildings: Global Fire Design, and ongoing support of the University of Canterbury fire engineering course.

Minister Chris Penk has agreed to a New Zealand building code fire safety review. Rather than looking at changing the Building Act the review is aiming at changes at the code level and below, and also potentially looking at associated documentation and legislation around fire safety. SFPE is one of the dozen or more industry expert bodies involved in that.

Our current steps are working with MBIE to shape the direction of that work and providing feedback on what we see are the high level issues. Future steps involve public feedback and the development of new updated guidance over the coming year or two.

This presents a great opportunity for people to be involved to make change and tangible improvements to fire safety provisions within New Zealand. Part of our focus will be to advocate for improvements where they are justified, and through becoming a member and being an active member, your voice can get heard.

There are a number of us already working on this, but it’s a significant body of work and a significant opportunity to make changes. Some of these changes are to resolve things like lack of clarity, conflicts between legislation and the like, so they will likely make a real impact.

The Health New Zealand Fire Safety Design Guide for Hospitals was published in July this year. Myself and a number of others have been involved over the past couple of years developing that guide, so that’s great to have that now done.

The guide is focused around providing a benchmark for new hospitals. We’re also writing a supplement to support improvements within existing buildings in order to provide greater clarity about what is reasonably practical when it comes to building upgrades. This supplement should be published later this year.

As reported in past years, there’s been focus on mass timber building design. In 2022, the Fire Safe Use of Wood in Buildings: Global Fire Design was issued internationally, and New Zealand’s Andy Buchanan was an author and editor of that publication.

Following that, there was a 2023 supplement around the design to support building code compliance in New Zealand. This year, though – the third part of it – is the development of a commentary document to provide explanations of the Global Fire Design and supplement from a New Zealand context. This is in final publication mode now, so we’ll see this soon.

Another area of SFPE engagement has been our involvement in the University of Canterbury fire engineering course. We’ve been providing high level direction around how they can align their teaching with the needs of the industry, and we’re also supporting some of the teaching there through guest lectures by SFPE members, and through award contributions to students for their case study work.

We’ve had a new executive since the AGM late last year. We’ve welcomed new Members to the executive and thanked those who have departed. Our next AGM will occur after FireNZ and anybody is welcome to stand for roles in the executive. You can make change and influence the industry, and we’d love to see you stand up and put yourself forward.

Practice Note 22 (Version 2) has been two years in the making, but we’re now in the final draft stages of that. This will replace the 2011 Version One of the guide, which is an Engineering New Zealand document, and we expect this to be issued in the coming months.

It’s been a year since Loafers Lodge, and that tragedy is still very much in our minds. We’re mindful that there will be lessons that will be learned and these are yet to be resolved and published because of the ongoing criminal court proceedings.

We’re mindful that today’s environment is presenting challenges around financial constraints. Designing around budgets, projects going on hold; these are challenges that can also become opportunities for us to be thinking hard around making buildings safer and not using budget as an excuse to do nothing. It’s an opportunity to make reasonable upgrades and to work with our clients to pivot and identify better ways of doing things.

I remember Engineering New Zealand and technical committee meetings where there were discussions about sustainability and around how design can influence sustainability, but the focus has now swung around to simply keeping the lights on. It’s an environment that’s challenging us to meet society expectations around responsible designing and also responsible financial management, and balancing these.

Following the 2023 elections, we have a new government and a new Minister who has made some statements around things like products and products supply. It will be interesting to see how some of the new government initiatives to keep the lights on will influence the industry if and when products from outside our traditional jurisdictions do come in.

We need to ensure that we provide feedback on the implications of such changes early. It’s a challenge for us to be mindful about how innovation can be good but potentially not-so-good.

One of our working groups has a focus on membership, professionalism, leadership and those initiatives. As a key body for fire engineering and fire safety professionals, we are always seeking new members, and to that end we’ve been looking to enhance and benefits of membership and to show the value of membership.

One of the things that we have been focusing on is membership engagement and delivering value to the Members. People should have been seeing quite a lot more communications from us this year. We’ve been publishing regular newsletters this year that highlight what the executive does, what’s going on in the industry, and publicising our ongoing webinars and other opportunities to connect.

And I’d like to think that 2025 will see even more and more engagement within our membership and with new members, including by our regional representatives who’ve been very active in driving local activities. Get in touch with your regional rep and let’s create even more connections through more activities.

Lastly, I wish all presenters, sponsors, exhibitors, and delegates that very best for Fire NZ 2024! We look forward to seeing you there!