KEY POINTS:
Trevor Sims, 57, has been a carpenter since he was 16. He is finally about to get some recognition.
From November 1, he and a first batch out of 176,000 other building workers - one in 12 of the national workforce - have been able to apply for registration under new regulations as "licensed building practitioners".
Sims, who manages Canam Construction's 80 carpenters, including nine apprentices, believes the new regime will force builders to hire quality workers after a period in the 1990s when apprenticeships virtually disappeared and skill levels slipped.
"We'll be paying more for the better ones, which is good for the industry as well. It's going to keep the grade up," he says.
For the public, the new regime, voluntary at first but compulsory from 2010, is the most visible sign that the Government is cracking down on unsafe practices that were condemned by Auckland structural engineer John Scarry in a 2002 "open letter" to his profession as "consistent only with a Third World country".
He documented 26 cases of bad practices, including one fault in a multi-storey building which he described as "tantamount to mass murder".
Local councils, he claimed, "have in general abrogated their responsibilities".
Already stung by the recent leaky building fiasco, the industry and the Government took the criticisms seriously.
The Institution of Professional Engineers (Ipenz) appointed a taskforce, which reported in 2003 that there had indeed been what Ipenz chief executive Andrew Cleland calls "a systemic failure of the then 1991 Building Act", because developers were not willing to pay for either site supervision or more than "the absolute minimum required to achieve a building consent".
It recommended local councils should require site supervision as a condition of building consents, developers should have to employ competent designers and builders, a sample of 50 buildings a year should be centrally audited, and work on new technical standards should be publicly funded rather than left to vested interests.
At the same time, responding largely to the leaky building crisis, the Government introduced a new Building Act which created a new regulatory body, the Department of Building and Housing, and the licensing building practitioner scheme to ensure that virtually everyone on a building site will soon have a recognised degree of competence.
Scarry is still angry.
"Things have got worse, not better," he says. "It has all degenerated into a whole lot of box-ticking."
His concerns are widely shared. Dr Barry Davidson, a former president of the Structural Engineering Society (Sesoc), says, "I support just about everything John has said."
There is a surprising degree of consensus that what has gone wrong is bound up in a general shift over the past 25 years from regulation to market forces.
Former Ipenz president Tony Gibson says that in 1984 more than half of Ipenz members worked for local or central government.
"The main driver of engineering in New Zealand was the Ministry of Works, and there were Ministry of Works manuals on everything," he says.
There was a comprehensive building code detailing how everything had to be done. "There were no shortcuts."
But the Labour Government of 1984-90 decided that government should get out of "business". The Ministry of Works was broken up in 1988 and its design division was sold in 1996 to a Malaysian company, which renamed it Opus, recently floated on the sharemarket.
Local councils followed suit, first separating their engineers who designed council roads and buildings from those who checked external building consents - work that used to be done by the same engineers. Gibson says this was a fatal change.
"You can't have engineers just checking calculations - they go mad, and more importantly they lose expertise when they are not involved in design," he says.
"So the expertise councils had in the regulatory area disappeared."
Recognising this, councils then farmed out their consent work to private firms that still had design expertise, and followed the logic by selling off their own design departments.
Clive Sligo, who was city engineer for the old Birkenhead City, transferred to the new North Shore City in the 1989 local body restructuring, but left in 1997.
"Over a decade there was a steady trickle of engineers out of local government into private practice.
"I don't know of anyone in local authorities now. This is the problem - there are not the people around who have the structural skills."
This has had two effects.
First, it means the council managers left in charge of building consents might not spot risky design features. And second, the exit of central and local government from the actual design of public buildings has been a big part of the rise of the "developer" - a company that exists simply to put up a new building and has no long-term interest in its use.
Whereas Ministry of Works buildings were notoriously "over-engineered" to withstand all possible contingencies, the developer's incentives are to get the building up as quickly and cheaply as possible.
Developers realised that they didn't have to pay engineers on the standard Ipenz fee scale which includes 20 per cent of the value of a job for on-site supervision.
"Developers started negotiating fees and getting bidding wars going," says Colin Nicholas of Auckland University who was then an engineer in private practice.
"The developers started to say, 'I don't need supervision,' so the engineer did it ... but started to rely on the developer or contractors to be competent and responsible enough to build what was drawn."
The process was assisted by the 1991 Building Act which adopted a "performance-based" regime, permitting any building technique as long as it achieved stated outcomes.
At the same time Standards NZ, created after the 1931 Napier earthquake to promote safe building standards, was moved on to a user-pays basis where its funding now comes largely from selling copies of its standards. This has forced it to prioritise updating standards in areas where it can sell a lot of copies. Canterbury University's Dr Richard Fenwick, who was on a committee which recently reviewed the concrete standard, says the process was "corrupted" by the pressure for profits.
Conversely, less profitable standards have been neglected. The Construction Industry Council complained last year that more than half of the 650 building-related standards are now "more than 10 years old, hopelessly out of date and in need of review".
Finally, in 2003, university research was moved on to a new "performance-based" funding system which gives high weighting to publications in overseas journals. Engineering academics say this has made it harder to get time to support the profession in New Zealand, such as by serving on standards committees (see separate story).
The Ipenz taskforce found that the cumulative "loose regulatory environment" had allowed practices to develop that "if they continue would place property or life at more than desirable risk during a major earthquake".
It cited four "unacceptable practices": precast concrete panels too thin for their height; precast two-layered "hollow-core" flooring which cracked in tests at Canterbury University; a new grade of reinforcing steel, 500E, that was launched before being properly tested; and the drift away from on-site engineering supervision.
Four years later, engineers say all these practices continue.
The Department of Building and Housing (DBH) issued a "practice advisory" note on hollow-core flooring in June 2005, but Fenwick is "still concerned about the safety of buildings being put up with it now".
"There are inherent problems with them that have not been solved," he says.
DBH has also issued an advisory against re-bending 500E steel made by the microalloy process at Pacific Steel except under strict conditions, and against any re-bending at all of steel made by the sudden-cooling "quench and temper" (QT) process.
In the microalloy process, which used to be the only one used here, the strength of the bar comes from its chemical composition, so it can bend in an earthquake without snapping.
In contrast, QT's strength comes from the sudden cooling which gives it a hard outer shell around a soft interior. Davidson says this makes it "very strong, but brittle". He says it's not suitable for New Zealand's high earthquake risks.
"They say you can't bend it," he says. "But you show me how to get precast units on site without bending it for transport and then bending it back again on site".
Pacific Steel general manager John Beveridge estimates that cheap QT imports from Southeast Asia now account for 15 to 20 per cent of the local reinforcing steel market. Pacific Steel has bowed to demand and now makes its own QT steel, accounting for a further 5 to 10 per cent of the market.
Charles Black of Glenfield's Reid Construction Systems, which makes a threaded insert to connect precast panels without having to bend starter bars, says only 35 per cent of the 80,000 precast panels installed in New Zealand every year use threaded inserts.
The other 65 per cent use protruding starter bars "which have the potential of being re-bent".
Scarry is also worried about spiral steel reinforcing not being installed safely.
"A third to a half of all reinforced concrete circular piles and columns must be considered an extreme seismic hazard because they are not properly anchored to the core," he warns.
Whereas his 2002 worries centred on earthquake risk, he points to examples in the past five years where design or construction have been so poor that buildings couldn't stand up even in stable conditions.
Last year, Auckland's $80 million Vector Arena site had to be evacuated in mid-construction after a truss supporting the roof dropped by 2-3cm and a bolt was found by someone sweeping the floor.
"A bolt did fall down because the area was overstressed and sheared the bolt off," says veteran engineer Murray Jacobs, who was brought in by Mainzeal to fix the problem.
"They stopped the railway trains going down there for a short period and evacuated the workers from the site. It was very close to having a collapse."
Two months ago, 400 Auckland University students were evacuated from the Railway Campus accommodation in the old central railway station after "serious structural issues" were found in the building.
A $40 million upgrade of Westfield's Chartwell Mall in Hamilton, which finally opened in May, was delayed six months because of what the company described as changes "relating to design loads and sideways bracing of walls, largely related to seismic detailing". Piles also had to be moved because of ground conditions.
Westfield's $210 million Albany Mall, opened on November 1, had to be changed after a peer review of the original design.
Waitakere's $27 million Trusts Stadium had to be referred to the Heavy Engineering Research Association after a problem arose. The problem was fixed before the stadium opened in 2004.
Davidson's firm was called in to fix problems for a builder on a multi-storey building project, which included apartments, where "the drawings were so inadequate that he couldn't build it - yet it had a building consent".
In a Christchurch case, a two-storey commercial building actually collapsed during construction because of an engineering mistake three years ago.
Engineer Arthur Tyndall, who was called in to help, says: "They extended the building and the consultant neglected to realise that one beam was getting double the load. No peer process had picked it up.
"If the builder had changed the way he poured the concrete, it could well have stayed up and no one would have been any wiser. Maybe it might then have collapsed with people in it."
On a smaller scale, Scarry has photos of concrete columns which split under the weight of the roof during construction of a Manukau retail development, and of poorly compacted concrete and misplaced beam joints in two Auckland schools.
The engineer who designed the work at the schools says the problems were caused by poor workmanship and the faults were fixed after the engineer spotted them.
Scarry scoffs at what has been done so far.
"There has to be a root and branch reform under the control of an engineering taskforce and probably a construction taskforce," he says.
But significant steps towards re-regulation are, in fact, under way.
The Building Act was completely rewritten in 2004. The Government says it will not outlaw do-it-yourself home builders, but it will require that certain restricted work that is "critical to the integrity of the building and the health and safety of its occupants" will have to be done or supervised by licensed building practitioners from November 2010.
Applications opened this month for the first seven licence categories - carpentry, three levels of site supervision and three levels of "design".
Both registered architects and chartered professional engineers will qualify automatically for the highest level 3 of design, allowing them to design buildings that are high-risk, historic or of high community importance.
DBH has also stated an "expectation" that anyone using a new Standards NZ structural loadings code will be a chartered professional engineer (CPEng).
But Ipenz worries that the regulations, which detail the skills required for level 3 design, do not actually require that designers are either chartered engineers or registered architects.
The new act also requires local councils and anyone else wanting to issue building consents to register as building consent authorities by next June (see separate story).
The building code is being reviewed with more specific requirements about the "performance" levels buildings need to demonstrate for such things as stability and sustainability. DBH has already issued practice advisories on some of the key issues.
Standards NZ has also been reviewed and in May the cabinet approved an as-yet-unspecified "limited amount of public good funding" to pay for new sector advisory boards to prioritise updated standards in each sector.
Cabinet has also approved public money for a new web-based standards information centre. But no decision has yet been made on whether standards should be available free, which would allow updates to be emailed automatically to users but would completely overturn Standards' current funding system.
The engineering bodies are concerned that some local councils still don't require engineers to supervise site work as a condition of building consents.
"It is becoming more common," says Sesoc president Ashley Smith.
DBH deputy chief executive Dave Kelly says it is now "predominant", and that the department may make site supervision "restricted work" so that it can be done only by licensed building practitioners from 2010.
Sligo says it would be impractical to recreate the old system where the city engineer, and at national level the Commissioner of Works, guided the building industry through public works.
"I think it's broken forever," he says.
But he says it is still desirable to have more engineers in key positions in both central and local government to make sure that market forces do not override public safety.
Ipenz and Sesoc have now backed off the Ipenz taskforce idea of centrally auditing a sample of perhaps 50 buildings a year to make sure local councils do their job properly. But Davidson, who was on the taskforce, still argues for this.
"Inland Revenue forces us to have good accounts just by knowing that they will randomly audit a proportion of businesses," he says.
"If Ipenz could go to Auckland City and say, 'I'd like to see the last three designs you have consented today,' and charge $100,000 because a whole lot of errors have been made, then you will get a quality of design.
"I don't think you can wait for an earthquake."
Publish and be damned
Two engineering lecturers at Auckland University have quit because of pressure to publish in international journals rather than research and teach about New Zealand conditions.
Senior lecturers Barry Davidson and Les Megget say the new funding system that gives high weighting to overseas journal articles means engineering students are graduating without enough practical training or knowledge of how to design for New Zealand's high earthquake risk.
"The engineering schools are not training people," says Davidson.
"They have been told by the Government that they have to get PhDs, and that's in conflict with training people to become good design engineers."
Megget, who edits the journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society, says the university is "keener on employing recent doctoral graduates who are very bright and turning out the required number of journal papers, but with no practical experience at all.
"The department at Auckland has lost a lot of senior staff in the past few years who had a lot of design experience, and they are not being replaced," he says.
"The overseas staff [who have been hired] on the design side have no experience with earthquake design at all."
He says final-year engineering student numbers have trebled from 60 in 2000 to 180 next year; and five structural engineers had left and were not replaced until the last six months.
"We were all working so hard, Barry included, that we were not doing as good a job as we ought to have, so the students were not getting as many assignments as they needed to, so they were not getting the hands-on experience," he says. "When they leave, there is nothing like the Ministry of Works that would take a young engineer and train them.
"It's a worry. I've said that if we don't push standards back up again we will start having things falling down, because I don't think there's much checking going on."
The Institution of Professional Engineers (Ipenz) has also expressed concerns about the new performance-based research funding scheme.
But the Auckland engineering school's sole "designer in residence", Colin Nicholas, says the university is still training "street-wise engineers".
"We are research-based," he says. "But we also produce very good practical engineers."
Increased regulations mean more staff
After cutting back on engineers for 15 years, local bodies are hiring again to cope with new building regulations.
North Shore City Council, which already employs 70 people on building consents work, says it may need a further eight to 10 to handle the extra work required by the new rules.
"There is a lot more checking than we did 10 years ago," says the council's building manager, Kelvin Goode.
"Also there is another factor - the average residential building today is quite complex compared with 15 or 30 years ago. They are not just the normal one-level residential building."
Most of the country's 73 city and district councils are now being put through the hoops to register as building consent authorities by next June, under the new Building Act.
They are starting from a long way back.
Five out of 10 councils surveyed by the Weekend Herald (Manukau, Papakura, Franklin, Whakatane and Rotorua) do not employ any chartered professional engineers in their building consent work.
Rodney has two chartered engineers in consent work plus two on contract, North Shore three, Auckland one plus three other engineers.
Most farm out most or all of their consent work to consultants. In Franklin that's just one firm (Opus), in Wellington two (Beca and Spencer Holmes), and in most other places a list of consultants who meet the councils' criteria.
In the central North Island thermal region, six councils (Whakatane, Opotiki, Rotorua, Kawerau, South Waikato and Taupo) have held a joint tender to choose a list of preferred consultants who will get the work largely on the basis of who can process it first as each case comes in.
"When we decide who to give a review job to, price is one of six elements we use to evaluate the tenders, and it doesn't have the highest rating," says Whakatane compliance manager Jeff Farrell, who co-ordinated the tender.
He says track record, experience, management skills and methodology have a higher weighting, so firms don't get work by quoting a cheap rate.
The councils say they now require on-site supervision by engineers as a condition of building consents much more than they used to.
"We ask our peer reviewers to identify any conditions of the construction that require engineers to sign off," says Farrell.
Auckland City building policy manager Bob de Leur says: "We have always required supervision as a condition of a consent, but we are tending to drive it a lot more these days."
And Rodney consents manager Richard Ritsma, who chairs a new national group of building control managers, says he is "putting a great deal more emphasis on getting the structural part of it observed by the engineer who designed it".
