Matt Cowley: Building consent bottleneck in Tauranga housing crisis

We can build all the infrastructure we want but unless the consenting process is smoother there will be a bottleneck, writes Matt Cowley. Photo / NZME

OPINION

Following Minister Nanaia Mahuta's decision to extend the Commissioners' term on Tauranga City Council to July 2024, I want to put the spotlight on a key issue that has held Tauranga back for years.

Tauranga City Council recently sent a newsletter to the development community explaining the reasons for their extraordinary delays in processing building consents.

The reasons for the delays were noted as two-fold: council staff isolating for Covid-19 and the spike in applications received to avoid the development contribution fee rise that was implemented on 1 February 2022.

The newsletter says, "During 'normal' times, our average number of elapsed working days (without stopping the clock) is approximately 35 working days (seven weeks). At present, the average elapsed working days is roughly 45 working days (nine weeks)."

The delays are so bad that I'm often told that applications haven't been looked at until well after the 20-working day deadline, required by the Building Act, has passed.

The city can have all the lead infrastructure we want, but unless councils approve titles and building consents, there won't be houses for people to live in.

The Commissioners have substantially increased building consent fees since they arrived, yet customers are experiencing worse turnaround times.

This is an open request for the Commissioners to prioritise fixing this legacy problem that is holding back the city's housing supply.

Previous issues such as Bella Vista, the CBD carpark building and the leaky building claims are bound to have instilled a risk-averse culture within Tauranga City Council.

Occasionally, there are designers and developers who submit poor quality applications, essentially outsourcing their quality control to the council and waiting for them to ask for specific information. However, these bad apples should be dealt with directly and not clog up the entire system for high-quality applications.

The industry is suggesting ideas for the council to implement. This includes the Urban Task Force's list of immediate and long-term improvements to speed up processing timeframes.

The council's newsletter does identify their solutions: recruiting five new building control officers, using contractors from other busy regions and offering remote (virtual) inspections.

But the big opportunities for improvement fundamentally lie in who takes the risk for when things go wrong – and this is another area that could be reviewed.

There is a classic Kiwi mentality that a good athlete is often believed to be a good coach, the best teacher is taken away from teaching to become the school principal, and the best technician is taken off the tools to sit behind a desk and lead people and administration.

Instead of consent planners managing the building consent process, perhaps the managers of council regulatory teams across the country need to be expert process leaders, who are experienced in leading complex approval processes at a large scale.

Improving Tauranga City Council's regulatory services timeframes is a key project for the Commissioners to focus their attention on, as it's a key bottleneck for addressing the city's housing supply issue.

- Matt Cowley is the chief executive of the Tauranga Chamber of Commerce.