Hayes Joanne: Weathertight Homes Resolution Services Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHayes Joanne: Weathertight Homes Resolution Services Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 10 March 2015. Volume:703;Page:2068. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JOANNE HAYES (National): I am pleased to stand and take a call to support the first reading of the Weathertight Homes Resolution Services Amendment Bill. When I sit here in the House and I hear other members saying leaky homes are a disgrace for this Government and the previous one I say that that happens when people and when Governments decide not to do anything about it and we are a Government that will do something about it—we are doing something about it. That is the bottom line and the only catchline that we should be thinking about is that we are getting on with it and we are dealing to it.You know it is putting things right that counts. When I hear our member Scott Simpson talking about the Local Government and Environment Committee which this bill is coming back to I say that I too am looking forward to it coming back because a few years ago at the end of 1999 I was working in Auckland and I saw some of those homes being built.In 2013 when my husband and I decided to build a home—well we did not actually decide to build a home; we had to build a home because we did not have a home—that was one of the things that went through my mind when we were designing the actual build itself. I can tell you now that when it comes to physics I am pretty poor at physics. I do not really know a lot about it. My husband would try to explain to me what a parapet was and he would actually have to draw it on a piece of paper for me so I could see what we were looking at when we were looking at the common features of a leaky home. Even the roof-to-wall junctions—even though we were building only a single-storey home he drew what that meant on a two-storey home and I thought: “Thank God we’re building a one-storey home.” Pergola fixings were pretty OK because we had a big deck around them. But yes when he started explaining it to me—especially what a flashing around a window was—and I started to get a bit of a feel about what the people the owners of leaky homes were going through I started to understand the issues that they were facing.This bill amends the Weathertight Homes Resolution Services Act 2006. In 2011 we amended it and that is when we introduced the financial assistance package to help owners repair their homes and to reduce legislation because the legislation was getting a little bit out of hand in terms of costs. We did that and I will keep reminding the House about this whenever I get the opportunity to speak. We decided to move to work on this particular legislation because it was the time when we had our global world recession which was hitting the world and this country. We were having the devastation of our earthquakes in Christchurch. Financial companies were going to the wall and then later of course we had our terrible tragedy at Pike River mine. You know the coffers were bare when we came in yet we were able to plan so that we could address the leaky homes issue that this country was facing.This bill has three main areas and my colleagues have been very articulate in being able to define what those three areas are. The location of eligibility looks at the financial assistance package which moves the criteria in clauses 1B and 1C of the 2011 Gazette notice into the Act which is good. It ensures that validity cannot be questioned over previous decisions made based on these criteria. So that is very good for this bill.The other area that it covers is the definition of what is “built”—yes my colleagues have defined that and clarified that very well. Just to round it up or to give an overview on it it is when a building is deemed to be built and not at the time of the council inspection. I am pleased to say it is at the issue of a code compliance certificate and that is exactly what happened with ours. So you know at the local government level things are working well I am very happy to say.Of course the last area of this bill is the expiry of the financial assistance package which I want to just flesh out a little bit more. Obviously it expires on 23 July 2016 but the little kind of difference about that is that for everybody who has a claim who gets it in on that day the claim will continue on. That is the key area—or I suppose a kind of little change—that we have put in here. So all of those people can claim right up to 23 July 2016 and they will qualify for assistance until they receive an issuing notice to proceed.With this financial assistance package the extension of the criterion of the date to include everybody up to that date adds another 70 applicants who could benefit from this bill. I just read in a clipping out of Stuff that the Minister for Building and Housing Nick Smith said that the changes to that particular area of the financial assistance package provided “sensible refinements” to the Act.By the end of January this year there were 1147 claims. That represents 3528 homes assessed and qualifying for Government assistance with as you will have heard before a lot more to come. Also as for the future cost we have heard before that the Government will put in 25 percent and so will local government leaving the owner to pay 50 percent of repair costs and that is a great step forward for those people who are affected by leaky homes. Essentially what we are expecting is to generate about $460 million in home repairs over that period.Really at the end of the day the bill does not change anything about the financial assistance package as I said but it does remove doubt. It removes doubt and uncertainty for the claimants and essentially it is a good bill. I am pleased that it is a bill that members across the House are supporting and that it is going to come to the select committee so that we can listen to the submissions from the applicants and/or family members as they put their cases to us in those hearings. So I am looking forward that.In summing up I just want to do a little bit of a background over the leaky homes issues because I think it is really important especially when somebody defines what a leaky home is. It is where water seeps in under the cladding system through the roof or through the sides and it cannot drain. It does not even dry out; it stays there for some time because it cannot go anywhere else. As we know this leaky home issue affects apartments townhouses and in some areas stand-alone homes that were built mainly between 1992 and 2005. I think that the legislation that is coming through has really tightened up building and the builders’ code of practice and code of compliance which is really good. So we are eliminating the cowboys within the sector and that is good for all those people who are wanting to build their new home—it was very good for us anyway.I want to say that we are prepared as a Government to stand by this awful situation. We are prepared to stand by it. I opened my speech by saying that in the first place and we will see this right through to the end for those people affected because at the end of the day it is those people who matter to us. They are the people of this country and they support what we are doing. We are spreading this package out as evenly and as fairly as we can and as I said before the Government and local government are helping with the payments of 25 percent.There is so much more that I could say on this bill but I will not. I will save that for its second and third readings. I commend this bill to the House. Thank you.