Profession gets to work on rebuilding image

By SIMON COLLINS

Whistleblowers who alleged widespread technical faults in New Zealand's building industry won support yesterday from the engineering profession that was one of their targets.

Auckland building surveyor Philip O'Sullivan, who first disclosed the extent of "leaky buildings", and structural engineer John Scarry, who says many high-rise blocks are not safe against earthquakes, received nothing but praise from the annual conference of the Institution of Professional Engineers (Ipenz) in Hamilton.

Marlborough engineer Ian Bond, a member of the Hunn Committee on leaky buildings, told his fellow engineers that Ipenz should have acted on the leaky homes scandal itself.

"Philip O'Sullivan is a registered engineer and practitioner in this field," Mr Bond said.

"He issued warnings for a long time but for a number of reasons he was not taken seriously. He didn't get a lot of support from the wider profession. We were slow to respond."

Incoming Ipenz president Gerry Coates told Mr Scarry after his speech: "I would like to congratulate you on your stand. Thank you for exemplifying the free nature of professional engineering."

Building Industry Authority chairman Barry Brown promised that the present "light-handed" regulation of the building industry would be tightened in response to both issues.

Mr Bond said local authorities were relying too much on "producer statements" by builders and engineers stating that their buildings were in line with the building code, instead of actually carrying out inspections.

"It's pretty hard to be satisfied that something has been done if you haven't even looked at it," he said.

"I think that's fundamental."

He said there was no qualification requirement for either council building inspectors or private building certifiers, who compete with the councils, to sign off building code compliance.

"One of the outcomes of the current review is likely to be qualification requirements for the regulators."

He said the Building Act's goal of minimising compliance costs for developers had created a "perverse incentive" for councils and private certifiers to sign off buildings as quickly as possible, regardless of how well they did the job.

"There is some evidence of territorial authorities having staff performance measures relating to a better than 10-day turnaround for building inspections, and minimising average time taken for site inspections, whereas quality of outcome is not measured," he said.

"The Building Industry Authority and territorial authorities are working together to develop codes of best practice to address this issue."

Mr Scarry told the conference that structural engineers were designing buildings too quickly because they were forced to offer low fees to win jobs.

He called for restoring a standard fee scale based on the value of each building.

Mr Coates told him that a regulated fee scale "would not work in the current ideology", and asked him whether there were other ways to regulate standards.

Mr Scarry replied: "I don't call it 'ideology'. It's idiotology."

Mr Brown said the authority would have draft codes of practice for building inspections and for building consents in place by June 30.

"These will provide a level of guidance to territorial authorities that has been sorely missing in the past."