Twyford PhilURBAN DEVELOPMENT BILLThird ReadingHon PHIL TWYFORD (Minister for Urban Development): I move That the Urban Development Bill be now read a third time. This bill enables a new type of urban development to be undertaken in New Zealand one that will transform communities and improve housing options; access to jobs green spaces and amenities; and the quality of the environment. The bill sits alongside wider system reform such as our comprehensive review of the resource management system with a focus on the Resource Management Act (RMA) and the Urban Growth Agenda. Last year this Government established Kāinga Ora with a mandate to initiate and enable urban development that is well-designed people-focused and ready for the future. In my second reading speech I spoke about how the Kāinga Ora—Homes and Communities Act was an expression of a commitment to roll up our sleeves and tackle long-term problems to work with the private sector and community organisations to fix problems that have accumulated over many years and were ignored for too long and to be an enabler of development and partnering with the private sector with local government and with iwi. This bill provides the tool kit for this work. It recognises that central government should have a much stronger role to play in the urban planning system. Central government should be an enabler of urban development that creates communities where people want to live work and play.The complex urban development that needs to happen in our larger towns and cities struggles to get ahead because we need to change the ways that we develop our urban areas so that our cities can thrive and everyone can have a place to call home. Traditionally in New Zealand really for the last century our cities have developed by turning neighbouring countryside into suburban streets and homes. Now that kind of horizontal expansion out by cities is still important but we know that we need to intensify our urban environment. The second-generation growth in our cities—that is urban intensification—is often too complex for the private sector to do on its own. These projects require work on network infrastructure fragmented land titles balancing different interests and creating high urban design standards and often all of that together on top of the myriad of different statutes that govern urban development creates too much risk and uncertainty for the private sector to lead these kinds of projects.This legislation is about having a public agency—Kāinga Ora—that can partner with the private sector with iwi and with local government to de-risk these projects so that people will invest in them and make them happen. Now this is before a developer needs to deal with misaligned processes and decision-making restrictive planning rules that too often stop our cities from growing up and out slow consenting difficulties in amalgamating land title and challenges around building or changing network infrastructure—or getting the commitment to build the infrastructure and the funding of development activities.This bill addresses the barriers to complex development by creating a streamlined process that gets decisions made upfront in an integrated way and it will enable large-scale developments to happen much more quickly. It represents a new way of doing urban development. Specified development projects that are set out in this bill are the kind of complex projects that by and large New Zealand has not undertaken. These projects have a scale that means they have the potential to transform our urban areas and deliver desperately needed housing and infrastructure.The bill enables specified development projects in two main ways. The first is by creating an integrated decision-making process to reduce the risks of complex urban development projects by bringing together multiple interdependent development processes into a single approval process without losing important checks and balances. The second is by equipping Kāinga Ora with a tool kit of development powers that it can use to overcome the barriers faced by transformational urban development projects such as planning constraints old and ageing infrastructure and limited funding and financing for urban development. Each of these tools is designed to address one of these barriers and using them together will enable multiple aspects of the urban environment to be changed with greater certainty speed and integration.I want to return to this idea of Government being an enabler of development. A key feature of Kāinga Ora's urban development tools is that they can also be used by others to deliver specified development projects through a joint venture or through delegation. From the moment we started developing the policy and the drafting of this legislation it was always our intent that the specified development projects would be joint-venture vehicles. The special powers exercised by Kāinga Ora but the development led crucially by partnerships between iwi between local government in places like Auckland Panuku—Auckland Council's development agency—and private sector developers. It's not our intent that by inserting central government into this space we displace the private sector or the other key actors—iwi and local government. It is our view that this legislation should be an enabler and it's my hope that developers will come forward that councils will come forward and that iwi and others will come forward with proposals to use this legislation to lead large-scale urban development projects.It's also my response to the Opposition's concerns that this legislation is not doing enough to support the private sector to build. Private developers and local authorities can use these tools and the streamlined processes to deliver specified development projects. But it's essential that the special powers are exercised transparently and accountably in a democratic way by Kāinga Ora. In addition to that this urban development legislation does not sit on its own; the National Policy Statement on Urban Development gazetted today will remove restrictive planning rules that stop our cities from expanding up and out creating an artificial scarcity of land and will free up heightened density rules that stop the city from growing out effectively rationing floor space. The national policy statement also removes rules that add unnecessary costs to housing development.Our joint spatial planning work with local government in the six high-growth metro centres means that for the first time local authorities are planning ahead. They're making room for growth instead of trying to stop growth working within a 30-year time horizon and collaborating with multiple councils in a region and with iwi. We're lining up Government agencies to provide an all-of-Government approach in the spatial planning partnerships so that schools hospitals and transport infrastructure is coordinated and integrated.The RMA review led by the Hon David Parker is working on more fundamental change to our urban planning system but I want to point out to members that the fundamental review of the RMA wouldn't necessarily fix the kind of challenge that this legislation is designed to deal with and that is the inherent complexity of large-scale urban development projects. The Infrastructure Funding and Financing Bill is also another step towards fixing a broken funding and financing system to support urban development by allowing the private sector to finance essential infrastructure to support more housing being built.Together all of these measures mean that this Government is delivering generational change to urban planning and urban development. We recognise that the housing crisis is a failure in public policy. It has many causes but the two chief amongst them are a broken system for funding and financing infrastructure and a highly restrictive planning system that stops our cities from growing. It recognises that the housing crisis is a failure to ground urban planning in economics and a failure to insert central government into a space which has been left to local authorities on their own for too long. This has been a long process but we're almost there and I want to thank all of the stakeholders the officials who've contributed to this work: people in the Clark- and English-led Governments who did policy work on the creation of an urban development authority the Productivity Commission all of the industry bodies the advocates and the community groups who contributed to the policy process. I also want to thank the officials for all of the work they have done in bringing this bill to the House. Thank you.