Strict social distancing rules for lifts, which would have created havoc for office workers around the country, have been ditched after pressure from landlords and the property industry who argued they were unworkable and may stall the COVID-19 recovery.

Safe Work Australia reversed its guidelines on Wednesday stating that there was now “no requirement to provide four square metres of space per person in lifts”.

The revised rules say that “you must still ensure, as far as you reasonably can, that people maintain physical distancing in lifts and lift waiting areas”.

It is a significant back down from the previous rules that would have created a major choke point for returning workers, adding hours to their journey, if only a few people could travel in a lift at any one time to maintain a 1.5-metre distance from each other.

The Property Council of Australia, which had lobbied strongly on the issue with the federal Attorney-General and Safe Work Australia, welcomed the major concession.

“The new guidelines on lift usage are sensible and practical, and give our building owners, managers and their tenants the certainty they need to plan their return to the office in coming weeks,” said the PCA’s chief executive Ken Morrison.

“If we hadn’t have had this outcome we would have had people milling around unable to get to their offices, posing a transmission risk in foyer areas.

“It provides recognition that if the COVIDSafe app requires a 15-minute proximity test before it does a digital handshake, then riding for a minute or a minute-and-a-half in a lift certainly doesn’t present that risk.”

Mr Morrison said that while a major impediment had been removed, there were still significant challenges to be addressed before employees could start to return to work as normal.

“The most significant one is public transport. Unlike lifts, you are on a train, a tram or a bus for quite a long period of time and particularly our larger cities just don’t work without public transport,” he said.

Darren Steinberg, chief executive of Australia’s largest office landlord, Dexus, welcomed the decision and said the removal of the four square metre restrictions in lifts would go a long way to enabling people to get to their tenancies in a quick and efficient manner.

“It is a far more sensible approach because it is all about the worker experience when we get back to work full time and this would have been a major detractor, spending a significant amount of time waiting for lifts,” he said.

But he warned there would still be delays given some restrictions in lifts would remain.

In landmark towers, such as Sydney’s Australia Square which has smaller lifts, the previous 1.5-metre rule would have limited lift capacity to just two people.

Workers could have been forced to wait as much as three hours to get to their desks at peak times if all staff were back at work, according to estimates by building owner Dexus.

The Work Safe rules also encourage lift programming to be modified to allow more efficient flow of users.

The updated rules retain the requirements of four square metres of space per person within offices and the need for a 1.5-metre separation between them.

This story originally appeared in the Australian Financial Review. Read the original story here.

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