Firing up the construction sector: Vanessa Weenink, MP for Banks Peninsula

The Government has announced reforms in the building and construction sector to make it quicker, easier, and cheaper for houses to be built in New Zealand.

It takes an average of 569 days for a home to be built and consented, and the cost of building a house is 50% more expensive in New Zealand than in Australia. Both these statistics need to be turned around so we can exit the housing crisis and rebuild our economy.

That’s why we are aiming to implement a new self-certification scheme for building professionals and accredited businesses carrying out low-risk work. Our opt-in self-certification scheme will remove unnecessary red tape; while keeping checks in place so we can get houses built quicker, and cheaper.

This system will be made up of two parts. One will ensure that qualified professionals such as plumbers, drainlayers and builders will be able to self-certify their own work for low-risk builds. This will bring these tradies in line with electricians and gasfitters who can already self-certify and deliver on what the industry has been asking for.

Secondly, the scheme will allow trustworthy businesses, such as group homebuilders who build hundreds of identical homes a year, to follow a more streamlined consent process. In addition to current quality assurances, this scheme will ensure a clear pathway for customers to remedy poor work, strengthened qualification requirements for building professionals, and strict disciplinary actions for careless or incompetent self-certifiers. This self-certification scheme will be limited to low-risk, basic residential dwellings, to focus resources and build our way out of the housing crisis.

These changes come alongside other moves such as increasing the Building Levy threshold to save Kiwis money when completing home renovations, allowing granny flats to be constructed without a resource consent, allowing remote inspections, cracking down on cowboy tradies, and allowing quicker approval for foreign building products into New Zealand. To grow the economy, create jobs, and build more affordable homes, we need a construction sector that is firing on all cylinders, and our Government is backing them to do so.