A facilities manager who had recently taken over a mixed commercial and retail building in Richmond went looking for the building’s annual essential safety measures report and could not find one. The previous manager had left, the handover had been thin, and the building file contained an occupancy permit, some maintenance invoices, and little else. When she contacted the building’s certifier, she learned that no essential safety measures report had been lodged for the building in two years, that several of the nominated measures had no maintenance records at all, and that the owner, as the party legally responsible, was exposed to penalties and to a far more serious problem if a fire or an incident occurred and the measures were found to have been neglected. She had inherited a compliance gap she did not create, and closing it became the first priority of her tenure.

That scenario plays out more often than it should across Melbourne’s commercial building stock, and it illustrates why a sound grasp of the essential safety measures regime is fundamental to competent facilities management. Essential safety measures are the fire-safety and occupant-safety systems and features that a building relies on to protect the people inside it, and Victorian law places a continuing obligation on building owners to keep those measures working and to certify annually that they have done so. For facilities managers, property managers and owners corporations, understanding what the essential safety measures regime requires, which systems it captures, how the annual report works, and where a building’s specific measures sit within it has become an unavoidable part of the role. This guide sets out the framework, the obligations, and the practical steps a building professional needs to take, with particular attention to the facade, access and height-safety measures that bear most directly on the external envelope of a commercial building.

What Essential Safety Measures Are

Before a facilities manager can manage a building’s compliance, it helps to be clear about what the term actually covers. Essential safety measures are the items, fittings and systems installed in a building to ensure the safety of occupants, principally in the event of a fire or an emergency, but extending to other safety functions as well. They are nominated for a particular building through its building permit and occupancy permit, or through a maintenance determination, and the specific schedule varies from building to building according to its age, classification, size and design.

The range of systems captured is broad. It includes the active fire-safety systems most people associate with building safety, such as fire detection and alarm systems, sprinkler systems, fire hydrants and hose reels, emergency lighting and exit signage. It extends to passive fire protection, including fire-resistant construction, fire and smoke doors, and the fire-rated seals that maintain compartmentation. It takes in mechanical systems such as smoke control and air-handling systems that perform a safety function, and it reaches the paths of egress, the exits and the measures that keep them usable in an emergency. Crucially for the purposes of building envelope and facade management, the schedule for many buildings also includes items connected to safe access and to the structural safety of elements that could endanger occupants or the public, which is where the work of a facade and height-safety specialist intersects directly with the regime.

Each nominated measure carries a required level of performance, the standard to which it must be maintained, drawn from the standard that applied when the building or the relevant works were approved. The essential safety measures obligation is not simply that these systems exist, but that they continue to perform to the nominated standard throughout the life of the building. That ongoing performance is what the maintenance regime and the annual report exist to confirm.

The Victorian Legal Framework

Facilities managers need to understand the legal architecture that creates the essential safety measures obligation, because the duty is a statutory one and the consequences of neglecting it are real. The framework rests on the Building Act 1993 and the Building Regulations made under it, which establish the requirement for nominated measures to be maintained and for building owners to report on that maintenance annually.

The building permit and occupancy permit issued for a building, or a maintenance determination made for it, nominate the essential safety measures that apply and set the standard and frequency of maintenance for each. From that point, the building owner carries a continuing obligation to maintain each measure to its nominated standard and to keep records demonstrating that maintenance has been carried out. Since 1 July 2025, the Building and Plumbing Commission Victoria has assumed the building regulatory functions previously administered by the Victorian Building Authority, and facilities managers should ensure that compliance documentation and any correspondence about essential safety measures reference the current body.

Overlaying the building legislation is the occupational health and safety framework. The Occupational Health and Safety Act 2004 and the Occupational Health and Safety Regulations 2017 impose a duty on those who manage or control a workplace to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, that it is safe. A building whose safety measures have been allowed to lapse is a workplace whose safety cannot be assured, and the reasonable-practicability standard reinforces the building-law obligation to keep those measures functioning. WorkSafe Victoria enforces the OHS framework, and where the maintenance of a nominated measure involves work at height or other high-risk work, the full suite of OHS obligations governs how that work is carried out. The intersection of building law and OHS law means that the essential safety measures regime is not a standalone compliance silo but part of the broader duty of care a building owner and manager owe to everyone who uses the building.

The consequences of non-compliance are not trivial. A building owner who fails to maintain these measures or to produce the annual report may face penalties, and in the event of a fire or an incident, the failure to maintain the nominated measures can have grave legal and financial consequences, quite apart from the risk to life that the regime exists to prevent. For a facilities manager, ensuring the essential safety measures obligation is met is therefore both a legal duty discharged on behalf of the owner and a core element of protecting the building’s occupants.

The Annual Essential Safety Measures Report

The centrepiece of the regime, from a facilities manager’s point of view, is the annual essential safety measures report. Each year, the building owner must prepare and sign a report, often called the annual essential safety measures report, confirming that each nominated measure has been inspected and maintained over the preceding twelve months and that each is operating at the required level of performance. The report must be held on the building premises and made available on request, and it is the single most important piece of evidence that the building’s safety obligations are being met.

Producing a defensible annual report depends on the maintenance having actually been done and documented across the year. Each nominated measure has a maintenance schedule, drawn from the standard that governs it, specifying what must be checked and how often. For some measures the interval is monthly or quarterly, for others annual, and the records of each inspection and any rectification feed into the annual report. A report signed without the underlying maintenance record behind it is worthless, and worse than worthless if it creates a false impression of compliance that collapses under scrutiny after an incident. The facilities manager’s task is to ensure that the maintenance happens on schedule, that the records are kept, and that the annual report reflects the true condition of the measures.

This is where coordination across the building’s maintenance programme matters. Many of the nominated measures require specialist attendance, and some, particularly those connected to the facade, the roof and safe access, require working at height. Structuring the year so that these inspections happen on schedule, with competent contractors and proper records, is the discipline that makes the annual report straightforward rather than a scramble. Our guidance on annual safety inspections for buildings with high access requirements sets out how to plan the access-dependent inspections into a coherent programme, which is directly relevant to the measures that bear on the building envelope.

Height Safety and Access Within the Essential Safety Measures Schedule

For a facade and access specialist, the most directly relevant part of the essential safety measures schedule is the set of measures concerned with safe access and the systems that allow the building to be maintained safely at height. On many commercial buildings, the anchor systems, static lines, guardrails and building maintenance units that enable facade and roof work are either nominated measures in their own right or captured within the building’s occupancy permit conditions, and their inspection and maintenance sit within the same compliance universe.

Permanent anchor points and horizontal lifeline systems installed for facade access must be inspected and recertified at intervals set by the governing standard, and a system that has lapsed is both a safety hazard and a compliance gap. Where these systems are nominated measures, their recertification feeds the annual report, and where they are not formally nominated, the OHS obligation to maintain a safe workplace requires their upkeep regardless. The duty-holder obligations that govern this work are set out in full in our guide to height safety compliance for Melbourne commercial buildings, and they apply directly to the maintenance of the access systems a building’s essential safety measures schedule may include. A facilities manager confirming the status of the building’s essential safety measures should establish early whether the anchor and access systems are nominated, because that determines how their inspection records feed the annual report.

Building maintenance units present a particular case. A BMU is the permanently installed cradle or platform system that allows a tall building’s facade to be accessed for cleaning and maintenance, and on buildings fitted with one, the BMU may fall within the measures obligations depending on the building’s age and its occupancy permit conditions. A BMU that has not been serviced and inspected in accordance with the governing standard is not compliant, and where it is a nominated measure, its servicing record is part of the annual report. Facilities managers should confirm with their certifier whether the BMU is listed, and should plan its servicing alongside the other access-dependent inspections rather than treating it in isolation. For buildings without a BMU, or where BMU access is impractical, IRATA-certified rope access provides the means to inspect and maintain the facade and the access systems themselves, and McPherson’s rope access and building maintenance capability allows the access-related measures to be inspected and serviced under one competent, compliant arrangement.

Facade and Structural Measures That Protect the Public

Beyond the access systems, the essential safety measures regime and the broader building-safety framework capture facade and structural elements whose failure could endanger occupants or the public below. This is territory that has become considerably more prominent since the cladding reforms, and it is where the condition of the building envelope connects directly to the building’s safety obligations.

Combustible cladding is the most visible example. Where a building carries high-risk cladding, the interim fire-safety measures and the eventual rectification sit within the building’s safety framework, and the condition of the facade becomes a matter the regime and the regulator take a direct interest in. More broadly, any facade element whose failure could injure someone, a loose panel, a deteriorating balustrade, a failing fixing, a glazing unit at risk of falling, is a safety concern that a diligent facilities manager monitors as part of keeping the building safe. While not every such element is a formally nominated measure, the OHS duty to maintain a safe workplace and the public-safety obligations that attach to a building owner mean these conditions cannot be ignored, and the condition records that a facade inspection produces inform the manager’s discharge of those duties. Our guidance on facade inspections during window cleaning explains how routine access can be used to monitor these elements continuously, feeding the broader safety picture that sits alongside the formal schedule.

The passive fire-protection measures within the facade deserve particular attention, because they are easily compromised by well-meaning maintenance. Fire-rated seals at slab edges, compartment boundaries and service penetrations are nominated measures, and a contractor who treats a fire-rated joint as an ordinary weatherseal during facade work creates a compliance problem that may not surface until the next annual report, or worse, until a fire tests the compartmentation that the seal was supposed to provide. This is one of the clearest illustrations of why the contractor engaged for facade and commercial facade repairs work must understand the building-safety implications of what they are doing, and must record any changes to fire-rated elements for inclusion in the building’s maintenance records.

Owners Corporations and Shared Responsibility

For strata and mixed-use buildings, the essential safety measures obligation sits alongside the owners corporation framework, and understanding how the two interact is essential for anyone managing common property. In a building subject to an owners corporation, the safety measures that serve common property, and the facade, access and structural elements that form part of common property, are generally the owners corporation’s responsibility to maintain, which means the maintenance obligation falls on the owners corporation as the relevant owner of those parts.

This has practical consequences for how maintenance is planned and funded. The Owners Corporations Act requires many owners corporations to maintain their common property in good and serviceable repair, and where a maintenance plan is required, the inspection and servicing of the building’s measures should appear in it as scheduled, funded items rather than as reactive costs that surface only when something fails or when the annual report falls due. The same division of common property determines who carries the obligation for each part of the building, and a facilities manager acting for a body corporate needs to establish that division clearly before the annual report falls due. A facilities manager acting for an owners corporation should ensure the body corporate understands that the annual report is its legal responsibility and that the committee must fund the maintenance the report depends on.

The weatherproofing and facade elements that an owners corporation maintains connect to this obligation as well. Facade resealing, for instance, is both a building-maintenance task and, where fire-rated joints are involved, a matter touching the building’s passive fire protection. Where fogging or seal failure in the glazing units themselves is involved, our guidance on condensation between double-glazed windows covers the glazing-integrity dimension, and the recording discipline that protects a building applies equally to the safety-critical seals within the facade.

Building a Defensible Compliance Position

A facilities manager who wants to put a building’s essential safety measures compliance on a sound footing can work through a clear sequence, and doing so converts a daunting obligation into a managed process. The starting point is to establish exactly which measures are nominated for the building, by obtaining the occupancy permit, any maintenance determination, and the schedule of measures from the building’s documentation or, where these are missing, by engaging a building surveyor to determine them.

With the schedule established, the next step is to confirm the maintenance requirement for each measure, the standard it must meet and the frequency at which it must be inspected, and to put in place a maintenance programme that delivers those inspections on schedule with competent contractors. For the access-dependent and facade-related measures, this means engaging a contractor with genuine height-safety and facade competence, IRATA-certified rope access capability, and the documentation discipline to produce inspection records that will support the annual essential safety measures report. The records of every inspection and rectification must be retained, because they are the foundation on which the annual report rests.

Record-keeping and handover deserve particular emphasis, because the compliance gaps that catch facilities managers out are most often created at the moment a building changes hands. When a manager leaves or a property transfers, the maintenance history, the schedule of nominated measures, the contractor records and the prior annual reports should pass to the incoming manager as a complete file. A building whose safety documentation survives a change of management is a building whose compliance is resilient; one whose records walk out the door with the departing manager is a building that quietly accumulates risk until an inspection or an incident exposes it. Insisting on a thorough handover of the safety-measures file, and maintaining it in a form that will transfer cleanly, is one of the simplest and most valuable disciplines a facilities manager can adopt.

Finally, the annual essential safety measures report must be prepared and signed each year, drawing on the maintenance records, and held on the premises. A building that maintains this discipline, a clear schedule, a funded maintenance programme, competent contractors, retained records and a signed annual report, is a building whose essential safety measures obligation is genuinely met rather than merely papered over. For the facade, access and height-safety measures within that schedule, McPherson brings the combination that makes the obligation straightforward to discharge: IRATA-certified rope access that reaches the full height of a commercial facade, the technical competence in facade, glazing and building maintenance to recognise and correctly address what the inspection finds, full compliance with the Victorian OHS framework and the high-risk work licensing that facade access demands, and the systematic documentation that makes the annual report defensible. Whether you have inherited a building with an uncertain compliance history, are planning the year’s inspection programme, or want the access-related essential safety measures folded into your ongoing facade and window cleaning arrangement, we can help you put and keep the building on a sound compliance footing. To discuss your building’s essential safety measures and the facade and access inspections that support them, call us today on 1300 30 15 40.