Beaumont Carol: Building Amendment Bill (No 2) — In Committee 
Beaumont Carol: Building Amendment Bill (No 2) — In Committee 
[Volume:655;Page:5085] 
CAROL BEAUMONT (Labour) 
: 
 I thought I would talk through the life of this bill the Building Amendment Bill (No 2).It has not been around long and I thought it would be timely to consider it. The bill was introduced by Labour prior to the House rising for the 2008 election. Its first reading was in March of this year. It was referred to the Local Government and Environment Committee which reported back on 11 May 2009. I had the pleasure of speaking on the second reading of this bill when it came up on 26 May. We are now at the Committee stage looking again at this bill. It has support across the Chamber which is always a very good thing. 
I want to follow on from my colleague Maryan Street and talk about why Labour supports this bill and in fact introduced it. For the first part we introduced it as part of a coordinated approach to assist in increasing the supply of good quality affordable homes. Both the Hon Maryan Street and Nicky Wagner talked about housing becoming increasingly unaffordable in recent times. 
I want to put on record the fact that the previous Government was very focused on the issue of housing. It knew how central having a decent place to live is to people’s lives. So it put in place a number of initiatives to help housing affordability. It looked at initiatives such as KiwiSaver helping people to save for a deposit it looked at enhanced assistance for first-home buyers through the Welcome Home Loan scheme and it also introduced a shared-equity programme. The rental for State housing was reduced and we looked at initiatives like the Hobsonville development which was started to assist in the provision of affordable housing. Of course that recently had a sad ending when the Prime Minister made sure that it did not include the affordable-housing component any more. I do not think that people wanted it in their neighbourhood. 
Certainly as I said the previous Government was very focused on affordable housing. It passed legislation to enable territorial authorities to increase the supply of affordable housing in their local areas. It announced a review of public land for potential new housing developments and a boost for the not-for-profit sector. With this bill through reducing compliance costs for starter homes and cutting red tape it again assisted with housing affordability. That puts it in context. 
This bill was introduced by Labour to help reduce unnecessary delays in the building consent process which causes frustration for everybody and also to reduce both the direct and indirect costs to owners and developers associated with the construction process while ensuring that quality homes and houses are constructed. That is very important. It is not about getting rid of all of the requirements around quality because we all know where that leads—this country has had a very unfortunate experience in that regard. It is about ensuring that quality is retained. 
The main purpose of the bill—and Cam Calder also outlined some of this—is to extend the functions and powers of the Department of Building and Housing to allow the issuing of national multiple-use approvals for dwellings and buildings; reduce the statutory time frame for the processing of building consent applications from 20 working days to 10 working days; differentiate between major and minor variations to consented building works; and make it voluntary for an owner to obtain a project information memorandum. 
Once the Local Government and Environment Committee had considered this bill it had very few changes to recommend back to the House. One of the main changes was to allow minor customisations as prescribed in regulations to be made to plans and specifications that have national multiple-use approval. Clause 5 states: “minor customisation in relation to an application for a building consent that incorporates plans and specifications that have national multiple-use approval means a minor modification addition or variation to those plans and specifications” whereas a minor variation has been defined as a “minor modification addition or variation to a building consent that is permitted by regulations”. The select committee also recommended that the time frame for the processing of national multiple-use approvals should be able to be imposed by regulation