Beaumont Carol: Building Amendment Bill (No 2) — Second Reading 
Beaumont Carol: Building Amendment Bill (No 2) — Second Reading 
[Volume:654;Page:3821] 
CAROL BEAUMONT (Labour) 
: 
 I rise to speak in support of the Building Amendment Bill (No 2). As has already been mentioned by my colleagues Labour supports this bill. Indeed the bill was introduced by the previous Labour Government in response to some of the concerns that have already been mentioned tonight. I also acknowledge my colleague Shane Jones and the chair of the Local Government and Environment Committee Chris Auchinvole. 
I thought it would be useful to consider some of the background to this bill. It addresses three major areas of concern. First of all there is the issue of national multiple-use consents. Mr Auchinvole may have already mentioned that 40 percent of all new homes in New Zealand are built by volume builders. Clearly efficiencies could be achieved if a system of national multiple-use consenting was introduced to provide for a streamlined approval process. Although a building design would be consented at a national level a building consent as Ms Wagner has already mentioned would still be required for each new building at the local level. That is important because each building at each site is unique in terms of ground conditions foundations connections to water and other utility services. 
Each building would also be subject to inspection by a local authority. 
I do not think that the Building Amendment Bill (No 2) goes anywhere near to meeting the concerns of our colleague David Garrett from the ACT Party because this bill still requires a building consent in order to ensure quality and safety. That is important. These things are not designed to irritate or to be there for no good purpose; they are there for quality and safety. The measure would reduce the time and effort required to process building consents resulting in quicker approvals. It would also give designers and volume builders a greater degree of certainty. That was the first area of concern. The second concern was in relation to amendments to building consents and essentially it was in response to concerns expressed by participants in the industry that the process for managing variations to building work was adding unnecessary costs and time delays to the process. The third concern which Nicky Wagner has talked about in some detail relates to project information memoranda which are intended to provide a one-stop shop for all information relating to building work requiring building consent. Unfortunately the minority of project information memoranda were applied for prior to building consent applications being made and consequently in most cases the benefit of providing advance warning when planning a building project is not being realised. 
Those three areas were the background to this bill. The purpose of the bill therefore became to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the building consent process and to extend the Department of Building and Housing’s functions and powers to allow it to issue national multiple-use approvals for dwellings and buildings that will be replicated on a substantial scale. It also will reduce the statutory time frame for processing a building consent from 20 working days to 10 working days where the application includes one of those national multiple-use approvals and that is important. It will differentiate between major and minor variations to consented building work and make it voluntary for an owner to obtain a project information memorandum for the reasons I outlined before. The Local Government and Environment Committee considered these concerns and recommended very few changes to the bill so I think the general thrust of the bill was seen as common sense and appropriate in order to respond to those concerns. 
The main change that the committee put up was around the customisation of national multiple-use approvals. I am sure members will be very interested in this bit so I will talk about it in some detail. The select committee has recommended that the bill explicitly allows minor customisations to be made to plans and specifications. A minor variation is around the actual building consent—a minor modification or additional variation to a building consent—whereas a minor customisation is a minor modification addition or variation to the plans and specifications to a building. Those were the matters that were changed by the select committee in considering this bill. 
Labour introduced the bill while in Government for the background reasons I gave before which were essentially to reduce unnecessary delays in the building consent process and to reduce both direct and indirect cost to owners and developers associated with the construction process while ensuring—and I underline this—that quality homes and houses are constructed. I think that everybody in the House would accept the importance of that. We have all seen the terrible consequences of the construction of buildings that are not of sufficient quality. Again I think that it is important having listened to comments like those made by our ACT colleague to realise that the failure of good-quality regulation actually leads to some very very unfortunate side effects that really damage people. The bill was also designed to ensure that quality homes and houses are constructed. People often like to make the comment that Labour is into unnecessary regulation or unnecessary compliance costs and I think that a bill like this shows quite the reverse. It shows that we are about making sure that things are efficient and effective and that we do not want unnecessary regulation or compliance costs but we do think that the balance to ensure quality and safety is also important. 
The bill was part of a significant package of work by the previous Labour Government in the area of increasing the supply of good-quality affordable homes. Labour has a very proud history in the area of housing. In our last term in Government we increased the housing stock by a net increase of over 7500 homes. It is worth noting that in the last term of the Labour Government we celebrated 70 years since the first State house was built in New Zealand. 
A number of initiatives were put in place to ensure that people could start to access good-quality affordable homes. That challenge remains today. I am certainly not saying that we managed to sort out all the problems but we looked at initiatives like KiwiSaver to make it possible for people to save for their first home deposit and we enhanced assistance for first-home buyers by widening the scope of the Welcome Home Loan programme and introducing a shared equity programme. We reduced the national average rent for State houses and reduced the nationwide State housing turnover. Again when people make accusations that the previous Government was a slum landlord they forget that an intensive maintenance and modernisation programme was put in place around improving our State houses through Labour’s Healthy Housing programme. We completed improvements to over 9500 properties and retrofitted more than 16500 homes. Funding was put in place to insulate State houses and all remaining State houses were to be insulated within 5 years. 
Initiatives like the Hobsonville development were started to assist in providing affordable homes. One of the very sad things that happened in recent times concerned that Hobsonville development. Plans to include 500 State houses in the development were fought by John Key—the now Prime Minister—when he was in Opposition as the local MP. The plans ended up being axed because he made certain promises to people in his electorate and said that they would not be inflicted with things like State houses in their area because we do not want that sort of thing around here thank you very much! That was a shame. The previous Labour Government did start that development and it was going to be a substantial mixed housing development. 
In its last term the previous Government also passed legislation that enables territorial authorities to increase the supply of affordable housing in their local area and we announced a review of public land for potential new housing developments and a boost for the not-for-profit sector reduced compliance costs for starter homes and the cutting of red tape through initiatives like this bill. My point is that this is an area that Labour sees as fundamental. The whole issue of quality affordable housing is one of our core principles because after all we all know that housing is of fundamental importance to people.