Twyford Phil: Weathertight Homes Resolution Services Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeTwyford Phil: Weathertight Homes Resolution Services Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 21 October 2015. Volume:709;Page:7419. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]PHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatū): You know you cannot walk around or drive around any of the newer suburbs in Auckland these days without coming across a house that is surrounded by scaffolding and wrapped in white plastic. It is just a sign of the times really—these houses that are wrapped up in white plastic. It looks bizarre but it has become an emblem of the kind of legacy of what PricewaterhouseCoopers calculated was a $22 billion calamity that afflicted New Zealand really over two decades.Hon Clayton Cosgrove: 23.PHIL TWYFORD: $23 billion Clayton Cosgrove says.I was baffled just by way of a preamble to Part 1 by Paula Bennett’s recent comments that New Zealand has moved on and that it is over the leaky homes crisis because this bill and particularly Part 1 as we will see makes changes to the qualifying criteria for the Financial Assistance Package. I thought it was baffling that she would say that and in the same breath would release her loopy rules task force report which proposes that builders are able to self-certify—to sign off their own work. In the years since the early 1990s—1994 I think it was—when we saw the deregulation of the building sector and all of the other factors that flowed through into the systemic breakdown that led to the leaky homes crisis if there was anything that we should have learnt it was that clear accountability and a strong commitment to quality assurance and quality control is what is needed.As my colleague Clayton Cosgrove pointed out this Financial Assistance Package was trumpeted by Maurice Williamson at the top of the news bulletins and in the front pages of the newspapers as a billion-dollar rescue package—a billion-dollar rescue package—but it did not really turn out that way. What we actually have seen is that although the Government announced that the scheme was going to fix 16450 homes as of about a year ago only 87 leaky homes had been fixed and the ministry said at the time that it had approved repair plans for another 364 and a further 3000 had qualified for assistance. But one commentator after another—including people like Paul Grimshaw and Tim Rainey two prominent lawyers representing the owners of leaky homes—made it clear that the Financial Assistance Package might have added another option for people who did not want to go through the courts and who felt that mediation or adjudication would not serve them very well. It gave them another option based on this concept of 25:25:50 with 25 percent of the cost to be picked up by the local authority 25 percent to be picked up by the Government and 50 percent to be picked up by the owner or the claimant.So what this bill does fundamentally is it sets out to provide a bit of clarity. It responds to a Supreme Court decision that we will talk about in a bit more detail and in doing so it slightly extends the eligibility criteria and the number of potential claimants.But I want to comment particularly about Part 1 of the bill. It basically deals with a lack of clarity that the courts have commented on in relation to the eligibility criteria. The criteria basically require that they exclude any claimant from eligibility where the claimant has initiated civil proceedings against a council in respect of a leaky home or has entered into adjudication. So you cannot have it both ways: if you have initiated civil proceedings and you are in court court action is under way or there is mediation or adjudication going on then you cannot also proceed under the Financial Assistance Package.So the main change in Part 1—[Bell rung]—is that it takes those eligibility criteria that have—The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Would the member like a call?PHIL TWYFORD: Thank you Mr Chairman. The eligibility criteria were contained in the Gazette notice and what this provision does is it moves them into the legislation proper “in order to avoid any doubt as to the intended effect of the criteria” and “so that there is no question of inconsistency with the Act.”I would actually be interested to hear from the Minister or even if there is a member who was on the Local Government and Environment Committee who heard the submissions. It is not entirely clear to me based on the written material available why there was any lack of clarity in the criteria those key criteria in the Gazette notice. So I would be interested to hear that because there is not a heck of a lot in this bill—only a couple of parts—but this is one of them. It seems pretty minor and technical to me but I would be interested in hearing an explanation about why it was worth addressing in Part 1.