Williamson Maurice: Building Amendment Bill (No 3) — In Committee 
Williamson Maurice: Building Amendment Bill (No 3) — In Committee 
[Volume:678;Page:831] 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON (Minister for Building and Construction) 
: 
 Let me deal with a couple of issues that Phil Twyford has raised because I think they are good questions that need to be answered. He first of all referred to section 14F in clause 10 and he said the bill fails to deal with liability—it circumscribes the liability of building consent authorities—and no one is to step into the gap. What I want to say to Phil Twyford is that none of this comes into effect until the regulations bring it into effect and I can give the member an absolute watertight assurance there are a couple of preconditions before that will happen. One of those preconditions is the No. 4 bill which has got all the consumer protection stuff in it that is needed—vitally needed—before we trigger this part. 
Also we do need to have a proper licensed building practitioner base because we do need the numbers. I am happy to report based on my officials’ report as at 8 February we had 12084 building practitioners through the licensing scheme already. That is just about exactly on track with the graph we had plotted. We thought we would need about 14000 by 1 March and we will be as near as damn it there with those numbers if that was the number back on 8 February. There is now a little bit of a bottleneck because unfortunately like a lot of people leaving their Christmas shopping until 24 December a lot of skilled practitioners did not put their application in until right near 1 March. But we are doing what I think are some practical things around that. 
Take for example a problem that has arisen with designers submitting their design but not yet being licensed as of 1 March. What we have found is that some local authorities are saying: “You are not a licensed designer so you cannot put a submission in for a consent.” What we are now asking the local authorities—and Auckland Council told me yesterday it was already doing it—to say is: “Look as long as you prove that you lodged your application to become a licensed practitioner and it is in the process of being dealt with then we will take your application for this consent. We will process it right through to the very end and issue it the moment you show that you have got your licence.” So it is actually going to get rid of that bottleneck. 
But I think the member is right and I think Shane Jones was right before: this scheme will not work until we have got a really good-sized pool of licensed practitioners. But what we will be able to then say to the consumer as we do to members when you are all—and I see you all on a Thursday night—getting on board a 737 is that there is not one of you not even Hone Harawira brave though he may be who would be getting on a 737 if you did not think that pilot up the front was licensed and it was shown that he was a skilled capable practitioner. It must be shown that he is a skilled capable practitioner and that is what we want to bring in. 
I want to refer to a couple of things that Andrew Williams raised because I think there is a bit of a dilemma here that all members are facing. First of all there seems to be a school of thought that while local authorities kept all the control and had all the powers they had previously that kept the industry working well. All I can say is that under all those strict rules that were in place we ended up with the leaky homes saga. So it was not the protection that people thought; in fact it did not provide anywhere near that protection. I feel a great deal of sympathy for a lot of local authorities because under a joint and several liability regime they ended up being the last man standing. They ended up being the ones that had to carry the can for what might have been shoddy practices across the design the construction or whatever. I actually would love to get back to holding local authorities accountable for only the bit that they do. If they do approve something that is not up to code they should be pinged but if they actually do not do anything wrong and it is the builder or it is the roofer or the person doing the flashings where the water leaked in the council should get away from that. 
But what I want to say to Mr Twyford is that section 14F does not change the liabilities of the building consent authority. It simply describes the status quo actually; exactly what is in the current Act—what building consent authorities are responsible for doing under the current Act. It says what they are responsible for—that is that an application for a building consent complies with the building code and then in section 14F(a)(ii) that “building work has been carried out in accordance with” it. 
I want to say that there is a good example for Lianne Dalziel to think about here. Back in 1987 the Christchurch City Council certified that the application seeking for the CTV Building to be built was up to code and then after it did its inspections it claimed the building was built to code. We now know after a very thorough and intensive investigation that the plans put forward were not up to the code of the day and that the building that was built was not up to code. 
So I want members to be very careful if they think that local authorities gave that total level of protection; they did not. And the Act— 
Phil Twyford 
: No one is saying that. 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON 
: OK actually I have heard some people say that we are taking away the protections that local authorities gave us and they did not. [ 
Interruption 
] I am sorry Mr Twyford. I do get very grumpy at people saying local authorities have deep pockets. They have only ratepayers’ pockets to dip into. Local authorities do not have deep pockets at all. They do not even have pockets; they dip their hands into other people’s pockets. I want to give confirmation back to Mr Twyford that section 14F does not change the liabilities of the current Act.