The plan, championed by Building and Construction Minister Chris Penk, is to let plumbers, drainlayers, and builders sign off their own work without council inspections, provided they’ve got indemnity insurance. Streamlining, they call it.
Let’s not kid ourselves...this is deregulation dressed up as efficiency. The leaky homes crisis, which cost New Zealanders a staggering $11 billion, was born from similar starry-eyed deregulation under the 1991 Building Act. Back then, light-handed regulation, untested building products, and a lack of oversight let shoddy construction flourish. Homes rotted, families were bankrupted, and councils were left holding the bag. Sound familiar?
Penk, a self-confessed idiot, reckons professional indemnity insurance and “competent” tradies will save the day. But here’s the rub: the construction sector already grapples with a high rate of failed inspections. Clifton Van Der Linden, a sector commentator, rightly points out that self-certification without beefed-up training and education is a recipe for disaster. And indemnity insurance? That’s just a bandage on a broken system…it won’t prevent defects, only shift some of the cost when things go pear-shaped.
Yesterday, The Post reported:
Builders and plumbers get the power to sign off their own work
…
To be eligible for the scheme, a plumber or drainlayer would need to demonstrate specific technical competencies, have clocked up a minimum number of years of practical experience, have a proven track record of complying with the building code and have adequate insurance.
The details of how tradies will attain accreditation are as always with National, limited.
But what really makes National's policy stupid are the stats. Auckland Council reported in 2015 that 29% of building inspections failed on average, with a peak week where just under 40% of inspections failed. Given Auckland Council conducted 132,000 inspections annually, this translates to approximately 38,280 failed inspections per year (based on the 29% average). The reasons provided for failures included poor workmanship, unskilled labour, and a lack of proper supervision, exacerbated by the high demand for new housing. A rough extrapolation suggests a whopping 80,000-100,000 failed inspections per year nationwide.
Making it easier for tradies to provide substandard work is only going to make things worse.
The coalition’s obsession with slashing red tape ignores why we have consenting processes in the first place, which makes the Labour party's tentative support of Penk's policy questionable. The leaky homes fiasco showed us what happens when you trust an under-regulated industry to police itself. Untreated timber, dodgy cladding, and corner-cutting builders created a catastrophe that took decades to untangle. Today’s proposal, along with allowing inferior products into the country, feels like a step back to that era, gambling with homeowners’ futures to appease industry mates crying about paperwork.
This government’s track record doesn’t inspire confidence either. From scrapping environmental protections to fast-tracking projects with minimal oversight, the coalition’s “get it done” mantra prioritises speed over safety. Self-certification might save a few bucks upfront, but when homes start failing, it’s ordinary Kiwis who’ll pay the price.
The leaky homes disaster taught us that cutting corners can cost people their livelihoods. If the Coalition of Chaos wants to avoid repeating history, they’d better listen to the sector’s warnings, invest in training, and keep robust oversight. Anything less is playing Russian roulette.
