The National Party is proposing to allow qualified engineers to sign off certain building work without needing council inspection and it also wants to designate a specialist Building Consent Authority to use a single pathway for consents.
Making the policy announcement on Wednesday, National’s Building and Construction spokesperson Chris Penk says "for too long, building has been slower and more expensive than it needs to be".
If National is re-elected into government, Penk says they would kick off these changes with commercial buildings, which make up around $9 billion of consented work each year.
“Large commercial buildings are complex projects. They often involve specialist engineering systems that are designed and peer reviewed by experts."
“But even when that expert work has already been done, these projects still have to go through a consent process that is often better suited to a standard house than a large retail or commercial development," Penk says.
"That can mean extra checks, extra paperwork, extra cost and extra uncertainty, without making buildings any safer or better quality.”
Penk says this will be fixed by the two changes National has proposed.
“First, we will allow qualified engineers to sign off building work without the need for a council inspection by formalising the role of producer statements in the Building Act."
The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) describes a producer statement as "a professional opinion based on sound judgment and specialist expertise. It is not a product warranty or guarantee of compliance".
"The producer statement system is intended to provide Building Consent Authorities with reasonable grounds for the issue of a Building Consent or a Code Compliance Certificate, without having to duplicate design or construction checking undertaken by others," MBIE says.
Penk says producer statements are widely used in the industry but have no formal status under the Building Act 2004, which “creates inconsistency and leads councils to duplicate checks over liability concerns".
Under National's proposed policy, the status of producer statements would change. Building Consent Authorities would have to accept that producer statements from qualified experts "mean the work complies with the building code, where those statements meet prescribed requirements”, he says.
By designating a specialist Building Consent Authority to consent for large commercial buildings, Penk says this would provide major projects “with a single clear, nationally consistent pathway with the right specialist expertise”.
He says this means complex projects will no longer need to depend on local councils having specialist staff available and it frees up councils to focus more on standard and residential consents.
“Streamlining commercial building consents will help get major projects moving faster, reduce unnecessary costs, support more jobs, and create more opportunities for New Zealanders."
2 Comments
Growth is epresseed in terms of doubling-time.
These muppets are attempting another doubling, therefore. Which is impossible. Commandeer all the DoC land, eliminate all govermnent, remove all rules - and you still can't double from here.
So now pick how long to collapse: @ 3%, a doubling is 24 years... so the pursuit of economic growth has substantively less than that, to go.
Where is the journalism? Where are the critiques?
Note: I have no problem with producer statements - but that's not the point.
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