Twyford Phil: Building Amendment Bill (No 3) — In Committee 
Twyford Phil: Building Amendment Bill (No 3) — In Committee 
[Volume:678;Page:830] 
PHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatu) 
: 
 I want to go from the general to the specific and point interested listeners in the direction of sections 14B to 14F of the Building Amendment Bill (No 3) in clause 10 which set out the guidelines really. They are not “definitive and exhaustive” but “are for guidance only”. Nevertheless they are among the most relevant parts of the bill to many of the contributions we have heard this afternoon so far. 
I want to particularly draw attention to section 14F which sets out the responsibilities of a building consent authority. As we have been discussing this afternoon it is really the councils the building consent authorities that have carried the can for the giant lapses in responsibility and in quality that have afflicted the New Zealand building industry over the last couple of decades. What section 14F does is circumscribe the responsibilities of the building consent authorities. No longer are they directly and unambiguously responsible for code compliance. What the new provision does is set out a kind of two-step chain of responsibility. The building consent authorities will now be responsible for ensuring that “an application for a building consent complies with the building code”—so that the application complies—and secondly that the “building work has been carried out in accordance with the building consent …”. You could argue that there is indeed a chain of responsibility there but many commentators lawyers and industry professionals have said that this amounts to a significant circumscribing of the responsibility of the building consent authorities and will be seen that way by the courts as these cases are argued out. 
I want to read into the record some of the comments that were made by for example the Registered Master Builders Federation which on this question of the allocation of responsibilities told the select committee that other measures including warranties insurances and liability reform need to underpin the changes but they are not yet available or even certain to be available in future. It said the legislative push behind this bill “is getting too far ahead of the necessary regulations making it impossible to assess the system as a whole and its effects.” This was the Registered Master Builders Federation. It supported “the review of the current joint and several liability regime to investigate the introduction of some form of proportional liability accompanied by a warranty and surety scheme; this would ensure that any shift away from the council’s ‘deep pockets’ was balanced by the availability of recovery from the other liable parties.” That is the point we have been trying to make all afternoon expressed in a very persuasive way by the Registered Master Builders Federation. It also went on to say about the piecemeal quality of this bill that “Where one of the interdependent pieces such as the balancing of responsibilities is implemented without the others such as a warranty and surety scheme or proportionate liability the goals of the Building Act Review are in our view not likely to be achieved.” 
I also want to quote Bob de Leur who for my money is one of the wisest and most experienced guys around in this sector. He made what I thought was an excellent submission on behalf of the Auckland Council. He too expressed concern that this stage of the review does not include a move to a proportionate liability system. He said that “The continuation of a joint and several liability regime means that Councils will continue to be the ‘last man standing’ and carry the … risk …” in spite of the efforts of the bill to reallocate responsibility. He advocated that “A mandatory warranty system backed by insurance would ensure that other parties to the development would be held accountable to fix any defects.” 
Local Government New Zealand which represents almost all of the building consent authorities was strongly critical of the piecemeal nature of the reforms. It said that too much of the detail has been deferred for inclusion in regulation and it referred to the practical ineffectiveness of the provisions in the bill intended to signal a reallocation of accountabilities due to duty of care and hence residual liability across all consent categories and the penalty regime for low risk consents in particular. 
The last point I want to make is about the licensed building practitioner scheme about which I do not think there is a lot of controversy in the House. People accept that it is the right way to go. But the question that I am left with—and again many submitters raised this issue—is whether or not we will have sufficient numbers of appropriately skilled and experienced licensed building practitioners to implement what is expected of them under this bill. There have been real doubts about the whole process of certification of the licensed building practitioners over the last year or so. I ask the Minister for Building and Construction to take a call on this and say whether he is confident that given the demands on the New Zealand building industry and given the fact that the Christchurch rebuild is looming and everybody wants to get started on it we do in fact have sufficient numbers of licensed building practitioners for them to do what is expected of them. 
I want to finish by citing a letter from a builder a constituent of one of my colleagues who says that the wait time to process applications by people wanting to become licensed building practitioners is currently estimated at 9 weeks and increasing and that last week—this is in mid-February—there were 500 applications in 1 week to be licensed building practitioners. So there is clearly a pent-up demand. People are rushing to get in before the deadline hits. This person cites cases of someone submitting some incomplete information and ending up having to wait up to 3 months to have the application processed. So that is a question for the Minister. Have we got sufficient numbers of licensed building practitioners in the system to do what the industry needs them to do under this bill? Secondly is he confident that the Department of Building and Housing has run the process properly to ensure we get what we need?