16 - Case studies

Purpose

To undertake case studies of building consents that were completed within a 6-12 month period prior to the review, to assess the adequacy of the Council's building consent processing and inspection regime, and to observe Building Code compliance assessment practices.

Background

The Department identified a number of building consents that were recently processed and approved by the Council and have progressed to code compliance certificate stage (although some case studies involved buildings that were still in the construction phase, to ensure sampling of process work was recent). These building consents were chosen to be typical of the building type the Council deals with, and also involved compliance elements that are known to be difficult or high risk (such as access for people with disabilities, or weathertightness of monolithic claddings).

The findings of the case studies were used to support and reinforce the more general review findings outlined under the other criteria.

Initial review

The review team conducted 19 case studies of completed buildings and noted a number of ways the Council could improve its building control activities. The main issues noted in the initial review were:

• the Council's consent processing staff were not identifying alternative solutions when they were submitted and were consequently not documenting why they were accepting or rejecting those alternative solutions
• the Council's vetting of building consent documentation required improvement as the case studies revealed that the Council was accepting building consent applications that did not contain the required information
• more rigorous and thorough inspection practices were required
• documentation of the inspection process was often inadequate.

Recommendations to the Council

Response from the Council

Improvements were required in: procedures for dealing with consent applications with insufficient information processes for documenting alternative solutions and the basis for their acceptance or rejection processing activities and inspections to ensure more rigorous and thorough processes and documentation and thus consistent compliance with all Building Code requirements training programmes that lift technical knowledge recruitment programmes that meet both short and longterm staff needs.

The Council introduced a number of initiatives as discussed under each part of the review’s terms of reference.

Follow-up review

Some of the findings of the initial review were still relevant and other issues emerged. In summary, the Department found that the Council was:

• generally achieving a greater level of compliance, in particular for residential or domestic work, compared to case studies assessed in the initial review
• still accepting building consent applications lacking sufficient detail and evidence to ensure compliance with the Building Code (see 4.1)
• not always including all relevant information in its project information memoranda and that there wasoften a lack of clarity surrounding the information that is included (see 4.2)
• placing a heavy reliance on the use of consent notations and that these were routinely being used to make up for deficiencies in consent documentation (see 4.4)
• not always providing justification for the acceptance of producer statements (see 6)
• not always meeting the accessibility requirements of the Building Code (see 10)
• not adequately documenting inspection findings; and that inspection sheets often contained little useful information.

Recommendations to the Council	Response from the Council
Continue to work on implementing the recommendations identified throughout this report.	The Council advised that it has taken the recommendations outlined in this and previous reports seriously and will continue to work through these and to monitor performance and change as a consequence.

Conclusion

The key findings from the case studies undertaken have been reflected throughout the report. The Department is concerned that a significant level of non-compliance is still being approved in some of the building consents issued by the Council. This will require the range of initiatives discussed in the report to be fully implemented. Our main message is that the Council's work to date is a good start, but ongoing effort is required.