Operationalisation of the overregulation of fire protection in building regulations law - fire protection regulations in comparison

Abstract

The fire protection safety concept of buildings is defined by material requirements. The Model Building Code (MBO) constitutes the basis. Within the federal states, building regulations and fire protection are determined by federal state building codes, which differ from the Model Building Code in various ways. Due to diverging fire protection require-ments and an increase in normative specifications, there is a perception of overregulation within the regulations but also official approval procedures. The objective of this dissertation research is to analyze the existence of overregulation re-sulting from building regulations as well as from demands in approval procedures. In total, there are four research focuses: (1) the operationalization of overregulation by objective indicators for research, (2) overregulation and divergences in the federal states and to the MBO, (3) overregulation regarding building types, material requirement areas, and perspec-tives, (4) overregulation regarding approval procedures. With these research focuses, the following questions are addressed: What indicators can be used to identify overregulation in fire protection? To what extent is overregulation of fire protection in Germany verifia-ble? To what extent can overregulation of fire protection be identified depending on the federal states, building types, areas, perspectives, and approval procedures? First, the concept of regulation is operationalized by deriving a framework with categories using qualitative content analysis. With this framework the federal state codes are ana-lyzed. Additionally, experts are surveyed in a questionnaire about their perception of over-regulation in fire protection. The closed questions of the expert survey are analyzed using descriptive (arithmetic mean and standard deviation) and inferential statistics (hypothesis testing and variance analysis). The qualitative evaluation of the open questions provides details on the perception of overregulation. Finally, the results of all evaluation methods were combined in a mixed methods design. The application of the framework resulted in both quantitatively and qualitatively higher and lower requirements within all federal states compared to the MBO. In the question-naire evaluation, no significant correlation was found between the perception of overregu-lation and the federal state. Existing divergences affect fire protection safety levels differ-ently across states. Regarding the MBO, no area of substantial overregulation was found in the analysis of the survey. Nevertheless, it is shown that participants who had a generally higher perception of overregulation also reported it in relation to areas of the MBO. Over-regulation was more present in approval procedures. Overall, overregulation mainly refers to existing buildings and special buildings, with most of the buildings being classified in building classes 3 (buildings up to a floor height of up to 7m on the last storey) and 5 (other buildings). The requirements relate in particular to rescue routes and to building compo-nents. A large portion of the overregulation identified was imposed by authorities through their decision. The analyses presented in this dissertation have accomplished the overall goals of the the-sis. It shows the importance of standardization of regulations, implementation of evaluation rules to regulate existing buildings and unregulated special buildings and emphasizes the need for professional qualification of the inspection authorities. The verification of the part-ly historical fire protection requirements and the verification of a new approach for pre-scriptive verification systems with risk-oriented measures for material requirements also seem important in this context.