Chris Penk: Building and Construction Minister on streamlining building consents process

There is potential for 67 building consent authorities to be replaced as the Government considers major reform of the system.

Despite there being just one building code, different regional interpretations are creating inconsistencies across the country.

Reform would see the process streamlined to reduce inconsistencies, costs, and delays.

Building and Construction Minister Chris Penk tells Heather du Plessis-Allan when considering the changes, the Government is considering how to avoid lowering quality.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Right.

Speaker 2 (00:00):
Well, if building consents drive you nuts for all of
the fiddly rules and the things that make absolutely no
sense at all, there might be some hope coming. The
government is considering some major reform of the system, potentially
seeing sixty seven authorities replaced with you who knows just
one maybe and with us. Now is the building in construction,
Minister Chris Panka.

Speaker 1 (00:17):
Kris boarding header mate?

Speaker 2 (00:19):
When you are thinking about this, have you got the
old leaky homes front and center?

Speaker 1 (00:23):
Yeah? Absolutely, Look, we're always considering how we can avoid
a scenario would lower the quality. We don't want to
do that. But the system is so inefficient at the moment.
You can actually get gained without reducing standards just by
having things much more joined up and actually much more
serious and inconsistent, including across those different sixty seven building
consent authorities that you just mentioned.

Speaker 2 (00:42):
How can you But here's the thing, how can you
have certainty and inconsistency if you've still got humans in
different building yet? Like, even if you've just got two
humans trying to interpret the same set of rules, there's
going to be potentially wacky ideas well.

Speaker 1 (00:56):
That's always going to be true at a level but
at the moment, you've got a recipe for greater level
of disaster in that regard because you've got all these
different organizations, each with their own interpretation. Of course, they've
all got their own risk profile because with joint and
several liability, in other words, one hundred percent of being
in the gun for what goes wrong if something falls over,

(01:17):
then they're all sort of very diligently during their own
thing in their own little corners of New Zealand. So
you maximize that. But with this human potential for subjective interpretations.
The other way you deal with that is you actually
have mechanisms we can say, well, I can cross check.
You know a number of builders who say to me,
I don't want to challenge the council because then I'm
going to be on some sort of blacklist, and that's

(01:38):
their only art of call. Whereas if you open it
up a bit more, they actually divide the possibility of
having some common sense applies for some of these ridiculous
stories that you do.

Speaker 2 (01:47):
Hear about what's your preference at the moment, do you
want to allow these guys to voluntarily get together and
decide how to voluntarily amalgamate basically, or do you want
to force them or do you just want one national
body handing out these building consents.

Speaker 1 (02:00):
Well, I'd mostly been thinking on the lines of a
single national body, although with the caveat that that would
look like farming out to a combination of existing ones,
as in the councilors might want to continue to do
that work somewhat by the way, Some do have the resources,
especially the smaller towns, but also maybe some private certifiers,
particularly backed by the accreditation and the insurance that would

(02:21):
go with that. So that had been my thinking, to
be honest, but wanting to talk with the sector. But recently,
actually a lot of them have come to me with
this idea of voluntarily consolidating resources within the region. So
I'm open to that. I don't really care in a way.
I just want a better system than what we've got,
which is any of the three options we put this,
I would.

Speaker 2 (02:38):
Agree with that. Hey, so listen, we're getting a lot
of talk about the fact that there is like there
are varying rules, right. Have you got an example of
one rule that you get different interpretations of across councils.

Speaker 1 (02:50):
Well, I mean so many different ones. I think that
the classic one is when you have one council approving
a set of plans and then another council not doing that,
so not even tuning up with inspections, and you can
sort of have a subjective opinion about whether enough screws
or whatever. A consens plan in accordance with the building

(03:10):
code that applies to the whole country should be the
same in any given area. And the problem with that,
of course is that when you've got builders who are
working at scale because they're doing offsite manufacturing in one
area and then transporting elsewhere, or you've got some prefabricated stuff.
All these obviously group bold theres as well playing their
trade across New Zealand they've got the economy of scale

(03:33):
in the productivity that we actually want to get to
another ones who are finding it hardest because they're dealing
with all the different councils at the moment. So that's
probably a cressit case that we've got to get past.

Speaker 2 (03:42):
I really appreciate you time, mate, look after you. So
there's Chris pink Building and Construction Ministry. For more from
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