Williams Poto: Building (Earthquake-prone Buildings) Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWilliams Poto: Building (Earthquake-prone Buildings) Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 30 March 2016. Volume:712;Page:10048. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]POTO WILLIAMS (Labour—Christchurch East): I am happy to take this call. It is quite a meaty bill and there are many parts of it that we will no doubt cover over the course of this Committee stage debate. I want to start perhaps with just saying that we all know that as a result of the earthquake sequence in Canterbury work has been done to assure the public of New Zealand that we are taking full cognisance of the risk of earthquakes and the state of our buildings across the country to ensure that we have got plans in place to ensure that we do not have similar types of issues that we had in Canterbury.Specifically within this bill there are three main issues that really speak to some of the concerns that came out of the Canterbury earthquake sequence. My colleague talked about deciding a triage I guess of seismic risk and of developing a process that really looked at identifying what type of earthquake posed more risk to buildings than others. We have stratified that into three categories of low medium and high. I do not know whether you have the GeoNet app on your phone. I certainly do. It is a bit of a pastime to see where quakes have been happening around the country. We have been getting quite a few through Porangahau and through some areas of the country but a lot of those lower-level earthquakes when they occur cause very little damage to buildings in those areas.Stratifying the risk and identifying what is low medium and high has been very useful and actually having a definition of medium seismic risk within this piece of legislation is useful as well as is identifying some priority buildings as well as those that we know we should be attending to first. So under the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment guidelines they have been identified as being the hospitals and emergency services and certain educational facilities. I want to speak of the unreinforced masonry buildings separately but those first two—the hospitals and the educational facilities—are important regardless of where they are across the country. They have a priority.Not only are they centres for medical support but in times of disaster they actually become the hub for the community. So they become the place that the community will go to to ensure they can get information or they can be accommodated. Often school facilities are used as places where people can stay where they can get a meal and where they can get information on what is happening in a disaster. So it is great that those buildings have been identified as being a priority for assessment and then going on to have the work to strengthen them should that be required.I come to the third point I wanted to make which is that it is really important that this bill includes the issue of unreinforced masonry because we know most significantly that during the February earthquake in Canterbury the parapets and verandahs that fell on people and on vehicles actually caused significant harm. In fact I think about 40 people lost their lives when parapets fell and so it is really important that as part of this legislation we take care of those buildings that have those unreinforced structures attached to them.Just in relation to the Supplementary Order Papers by David Seymour I notice that there has been quite an extraordinary amount of work that has gone into particularly Supplementary Order Paper 156 which really looks at the earthquake life-risk rating. Through a process of identifying the risk rating for a particular building and doing an assessment of that Mr Seymour is attempting to I guess provide a mechanism for those owners of those properties to then find the ability to identify what is low risk and then if they can identify that they are low risk they are able to receive an exemption. The exemption is then noted in the register and then any material changes to that particular building would mean that the building would no longer qualify for that exemption and a material change in circumstances would be noted. I do note however that it is the owner’s responsibility to notify when there is a change in circumstances to the territorial authority and this does put the onus back on the owner to do this work.My only argument against this proposal is that I think it would be much better if we actually build our buildings up to building code in the first place and then we do not have to have an assessment to assess which buildings are low priority to be remediated in terms of their earthquake-prone nature. It would be much more positive to have the solution being good engineering and substantial building codes to build buildings properly in the first place because there is an issue that we have that may not be identified with this Supplementary Order Paper.There is a set of criteria within this Supplementary Order Paper that could determine what buildings are low risk—you know that is the seismic capacity of the building the construction characteristics the occupancy and when this building is occupied the conditions that may change to affect the earthquake risk rating the seismic risk and its location to other buildings. If you will recall during the Canterbury earthquakes the Hotel Grand Chancellor was one such building that posed a risk to the other buildings around it. Those buildings were not necessarily damaged to the extent that they had to be demolished; however because of the threat of the Hotel Grand Chancellor falling on top of them they became hugely risky. Those buildings were closed as a result of the risk posed to them by another building.So I would want Mr Seymour to consider within this Supplementary Order Paper whether the risk rating of a particular building is dependent on the building next door to it or being in proximity which may cause it some risk. That I think is something that Mr Seymour may want to explore. On that note there is plenty to explore within this bill and I am happy to take a call later. Thank you.