5. Housing and Urban Development Minister—Statements on Urban DevelopmentHon JUDITH COLLINS (National—Papakura) to the Minister of Housing and Urban DevelopmentHousing and Urban Development Minister—Statements on Urban Development5. Hon JUDITH COLLINS (National—Papakura) to the Minister of Housing and Urban Development: Does he stand by all his reported statements regarding the establishment of an Urban Development Authority?Hon PHIL TWYFORD (Minister of Housing and Urban Development): Malo e laumalie Mr Speaker. Yes in the context in which they were made.Hon Judith Collins: What is the budget for the establishment and ongoing costs of the urban development authority?Hon PHIL TWYFORD: The policy process is not even complete. The legislation is not before the House. There is currently no budget for the urban development authority.Hon Judith Collins: Was he expecting to recoup the cost of the urban development authority from the Auckland Council when he said it will become the planning and consenting authority" and "have access to all the planning and consenting powers" currently held by the council?Hon PHIL TWYFORD: The planned urban development authority is a new way of planning large-scale and complex urban development projects. The entity is expected to be established towards the end of next year and the Government's plan is that the urban development authority will lead and facilitate the establishment of 12 to 15 large-scale projects—projects that are capable of delivering thousands of new homes and planned new communities. The authority will have the planning and consenting powers that currently only local government has but those powers will be exercised only in discrete project areas. It is not intended that it will be a rival or competitive consenting authority across the entire country.SPEAKER: Order! I am going to ask the member Judith Collins to ask the question again.Hon Judith Collins: Was he expecting to recoup the cost of the urban development authority from the Auckland Council when he said it will become "the planning and consenting authority" and "have access to all the planning and consenting powers" currently held by the council?Hon PHIL TWYFORD: No.Hon Judith Collins: If the urban development authority is to become the "planning and consenting authority" for KiwiBuild developments why should mum and dad developers still be expected to endure the delays currently expected from the Auckland Council?Hon PHIL TWYFORD: They won't because this Government has a complex and ambitious urban growth agenda that is designed to tackle all of the problems and the roadblocks in the consenting system the way that our planning system stops our towns and cities from growing and the way that the infrastructure financing system is broken and acts as a roadblock to urban growth. So there is a whole reform agenda designed to tackle the problems that the current planning and consenting system put in the way of all developers not just mum and dad developers.Hon Judith Collins: If as he has said the urban development authority will "be able to override [Auckland Council's] Unitary Plan" why should every other Aucklander have to comply with it?Hon PHIL TWYFORD: Because this Government recognises we have an imperative that in our country's largest city we have to build more houses and we have to undertake high-quality master-planned large-scale development. We need an entity to do that because the current institutions and policy settings have singularly failed to deliver. We have that ambition and I guess we probably shared it with the last Government because they spent 12 months consulting with the public on the proposal for an urban development authority.Marja Lubeck: Malo e laumalie Mr Speaker. Why is the Government establishing an urban development authority?Hon PHIL TWYFORD: Because traditionally New Zealand's towns and cities have grown simply by turning neighbouring rural land into suburban homes. Brownfield development in cities is more difficult and risky because of poor-quality infrastructure and disparate landowners. The urban development authority is a new way of planning these large-scale developments. It will be a one-stop shop for all the development capability this Government needs to build our way out of the national housing crisis.Marja Lubeck: What is the Government doing to free up land and enable development?Hon PHIL TWYFORD: The Government has an ambitious plan to create the conditions so that the market can respond to growth and bring down the high cost of urban land. The main objective of our Urban Growth Agenda is to improve housing affordability encourage more competitive urban land markets and improve housing affordability. The three key areas are infrastructure funding and financing to enable a more responsive supply of infrastructure finance urban planning that allows our cities to grow up and out while delivering a quality-built environment and thirdly a stronger spatial planning partnership so that central government and local government can plan together for growth.Hon Judith Collins: Will he support substantive reform of the Resource Management Act (RMA) to enable housing and urban development to proceed efficiently for all New Zealanders?Hon PHIL TWYFORD: Well if the National Party's offering a bipartisan opportunity to support reforms to the planning system that genuinely encourage more urban growth and more affordable housing our side of the House would support that. But what we saw for nine years from that side of the House was ham-fisted attempts to gut the RMA of its environmental protections and a series of reforms that only succeeded in making the RMA more expensive and more complicated."