Budget 2005: Stopping the rot costs $4m more

The Government will spend an extra $4 million a year to supervise the building industry to try to avoid more leaky homes.

The Budget provides $658,000 for expanded building regulation and control, an extra $187,000 for licensing builders and other construction professionals, $1.6 million for regulatory policy and $1.6 million for a new mobile residential tenancy service.

It also increases spending on the Weathertight Homes Resolution Service from $16.4 million last year to $17.7 million.

Building Issues Minister Chris Carter said the Government was "determined to ensure that a problem on the scale of the leaky buildings crisis does not occur again".

But Philip O'Sullivan, an Auckland building assessor who helped expose leaky buildings, said the Government was still not accepting its responsibility for the loose controls that allowed buildings to be put up without proper protection from the rain.

"The normal thing is to find fault with the designer, the developer, the builder, the council. The reality is that they were building with fundamentally unsound systems and the Government had a part to play in that."

On May 5, 2261 claims were still awaiting resolution, including 1615 in the five Auckland districts - Rodney to Manukau.

The Weathertight Homes Resolutions Service has resolved 305 claims so far.