Executive Summary
2. As part of the government's Quality Regulation Review, the Department of Building and Housing led a project with the Ministry for the Environment, the Department of Internal Affairs and Local Government New Zealand to identify and address issues for business in complying with resource, building and related regulations when building on land.
3. The main issues identified by the businesses spoken to in the study concerned:
- Delays and unpredictable time frames in the processing of resource consents, building consents and code compliance certificates;
- Inconsistencies in the interpretation of regulatory requirements by those administering them.
4. The causes of these issues were found to relate mainly to how the system is administered rather than to its policy and legislative underpinnings.
5. While there are already initiatives underway across central and local government to improve administration of resource and building regulatory requirements, it is the view of officials that more can be done to:
- Improve access to information for users on all regulatory requirements;
- Improve connections between related regulatory requirements;
- Improve expectations and accountabilities for administrative performance;
- Improve consistency of administration and decision making across local authorities;
- Address labour and skill shortages that are negatively impacting on administrative performance.
6. The Minister for the Environment, the Minister for Local Government, the Minister for Commerce and the President of Local Government New Zealand were consulted on a draft of this paper and agree with the issues and solutions proposed in this paper.
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