Building quality

Weathertightness remains a major building quality issue in New Zealand. The number of claims being made to the Weathertight Homes Resolution Service (WHRS) grew over thea last year. The WHRS had 2109 active claims as at 28 February 2005, compared to 1892 active claims at 8 July 2004.⁵ Claims arising in Auckland City exceed claims in any other territorial authority location by three times. The majority of active claims involve apartment complexes (64 percent).

At present, the main period of weathertightness failure appears to be 1993 to 1999. Eighty-five percent of claims made to WHRS relate to buildings for which consents were obtained during this period.⁶ 

Figure 6: Year of Building Consent issue for active WHRS claims

Other building quality issues have also emerged over the past 3 years and are being addressed. These include:

• high-rise construction: specific concerns have been raised about a small number of design and construction practices
• high-density housing: in the areas of hygiene, laundering, food preparation, ventilation, interior environment, airborne and impact sound, balcony sizes, and lifts
• the fire safety of some buildings: particularly around single stairway access in high-rise apartment buildings.

Territorial authorities - co-regulators

The building regulatory framework in New Zealand, which controls the quality of building work, is mainly implemented by territorial authorities.⁷ Half of New Zealand's building regulation activity is undertaken by only 15 of the 74 territorial authorities. The greatest volume of regulatory activity continues to take place in the Auckland region, with six Auckland region territorial authorities among the top 15 by volume.

Over the next year, the Department will undertake a number of initiatives to improve building quality including reviewing the Building Code; reviewing and developing Compliance Documents; providing guidance information; building its sector monitoring capability; establishing a new framework for monitoring the performance of building consent authorities; establishing a Chief Executive's Building Advisory Panel to provide independent specialist advice to the Chief Executive about current and emerging trends in building design, and building technologies and other factors that may affect the building industry; and utilising technical advisory panels for structure, fire, building envelope and access for people with disabilities.

 ⁵ 16 months previously, at 29 May 2003, the WHRS had received 727 applications from homeowners covering 1616 individual dwellings. These figures however, are not comparable with the currently monitored ‘active claims’ because WHRS had applied a different method of counting claims.
 ⁶ The date the building consent was issued has been identified by WHRS in 84 percent of all claims. Only this data was used to calculate the distribution.
 ⁷ The Building Act 2004 provides for building control services to be undertaken by private building consent authorities.