Chadwick Steve: Building (Late Consent is a Free Consent) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Chadwick Steve: Building (Late Consent is a Free Consent) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:640;Page:10737] 
STEVE CHADWICK (Labour—Rotorua) 
: 
 Normally the Local Government and Environment Committee works very well on legislation. It is any member’s right to bring legislation to this House in a genuine attempt to fix a problem but this bill simply does not do that. This bill is absolutely barmy. 
Nineteen of the 24 submitters to the select committee were not just opposed to this bill but vehemently opposed to it and I want to talk about the reason. Fundamentally there is no such thing as a free consent and the member opposite knows it. Somebody has to absorb those costs somewhere; somebody has to pay. The National Party wants to hold or reduce rates so it is a delicious irony that this bill’s approach—that if the council is late in processing a building consent it has to waive the fee—has the perverse incentive of loading on to every other ratepayer in the community the costs of those who apply for a building consent. What are councils going to do when they do not get the fees and they do not get the levies? How are councils going to address issues like research standards development and dispute resolution? Who will fund those activities which are needed now in a very complex building environment? 
But there is one other aspect that I find deeply disturbing because it is punitive. Of course the local authorities voted against this bill. Why? Because it is punitive and provides the wrong incentive for them to improve their performance. I think that the local councils have had a very clear message in the National Party’s local government bill. It is perform or penalise; those members say they will penalise and come down hard on the local authorities. That is why the local authorities rose up and were violently opposed to this bill. 
Jacqui Dean 
: Violent? Not violent. 
STEVE CHADWICK 
: They were very angry about it actually. The Wellington City Council said it did not want a punitive approach. It would rather work with the industry and work with the Department of Building and Housing to learn about the new building code to learn about the accreditation system and to learn about the regulatory environment that is fixing systemically the dreadfully deregulated approach in the 1990s that resulted in the Hunn inquiry and the leaky buildings inquiry. I was involved with both of those inquiries and they showed a totally fragmented deregulated and untrained environment. There was no trade training or apprenticeships at all during the 1990s. That is why we ended up with the systemic problems of leaky homes. The Wellington City Council did not want a punitive approach. It said it will fix it; it is not right yet—certainly not. 
There is plenty of scope currently a local government sector told us to reduce delays in the consenting process. One quite good aspect of this bill is that we started to look at what we can do to improve the current problems. But the size of the problem is not half as big as the member opposite is telling us. Twenty percent of building consents are not granted within 20 days. So this bill is a sledgehammer to crack a nut. But we certainly do need to improve the process. Every local authority said that. 
The local authorities also told us that 50 percent of the documentation they get before them is totally inadequate. They are blamed for the lack of documentation and rigour in applicant information that comes before them and they then have to waive the fee. It is quite daft. They asked why they have to carry the burden of a shortage of qualified building inspectors and a shortage of licensed building practitioners. Who got rid of trade training and apprenticeships in the 1990s? It was National. It is no wonder we are left with this mess. 
We heard some good submissions. The Property Council talked about the 19-day syndrome. Because of inadequate information from the applicant not the local council the council is going to stop the clock. It also said that a 20-day limit does not fit all situations. It was just a ridiculous time-limited boundary that did not take into account the complexity of the many building processes and the many building specifications that its members have to deal with. The Property Council wants incentives that are not perverse and do not induce silly behavioural responses. The councils will simply stop the clock and we know that. 
Some of the arguments we heard stated that delays in processing occur because of a multiplicity of factors. It is unfair to penalise the councils for that. The bill risks promoting speed in consent processes at the expense of quality so what will the councils do? They will cut quality. I know that Dr Smith does not want that. We were told that the councils will make a deliberate shift in policy to deal with the high-cost highly complex building consents first because they do not want to carry the risk of losing the fee for those. So the ordinary punters whom the Opposition says it likes to support will be way down the order in the consenting process. It simply will not work. 
We were also really concerned that the systemic failures that caused the leaky homes and that we are trying to address are simply not covered in this bill. It is absolutely silent on things that can be done to improve processes. It is simply a time-framing issue. The bill is silent on levies and it is silent on consent application fees. There is no mention at all as to who will fund the research the development of standards and the dispute resolution services. 
This bill is a failed approach to try to address a problem. The local authorities asked for some best-practice guidelines so that they can learn from one another. They all admitted that they needed to do better than this. They asked for some education on the building code. They asked us to go—as we did on the resource consent process—around council hearing committees and give education; to go and have some workshops twice a year with the building industry so that applicants and developers do know what the requirements are. [ 
Interruption 
] What a good idea! It has happened with resource consents and that certainly improved the performance of the consenting process under the Resource Management Act. 
This bill is fundamentally flawed. It was really quite tragic to have it in front of the select committee. Then the media response—not the select committee response—to this bill came out. The Queenstown Lakes District Council said it was nonsense and hoped it would not be passed and the Whangarei District Council said it was just an appallingly short-sighted bill. We cannot do a quick fix in a member’s bill to try to fix these systemic problems. 
I am very confident that the accreditation process which is putting some pressure on local authorities to meet the deadlines and the current review process are actually raising lots of issues for the Department of Building and Housing to go back and work on with local authorities. I know that developers and builders will come to grips with the building code in the new Building Act. As a result of that in 10 years’ time we will be looking back to see that we no longer have the dreadful depth of problems of leaky buildings in this country. It is a problem that we all need to fix.