Environment Minister David Parker has unveiled the legislation that will replace the RMA. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Environment Minister David Parker has unveiled the legislation that will replace the RMA. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Environment Minister David Parker unveiled legislation to replace the ailing Resource Management Act today, which he said will cut costs by almost $150 million a year and shorten the time to get a building consent.
He said a “conservative” estimate showed the reforms would cut costs to users by 19 per cent a year, equating to $149m a year and save $10b over 30 years.
The RMA is being replaced by one major piece of legislation, the Natural and Built Environments Act (NBA), and two more minor pieces of legislation: the Spatial Planning Act (SPA) and the Climate Adaptation Act (CAA). The Government aims to pass both pieces of legislation into law by the election next year.
The NBA and SPA were unveiled today and the CAA, now the responsibility of Climate Change Minister James Shaw, will come next year.
The system is incredibly complex and will require a long transition period, expected to be roughly 10 years.
That means the RMA will live on for years to come, while different regions transition to the new system.
Once fully up and running, the system will mean fewer things needing resource consent, and larger projects requiring fewer “bespoke” consents. Instead “off-the-shelf” standards will govern much infrastructure development, cutting time, red tape, and cost.
“Off-the-shelf standards for housing and infrastructure projects will remove the need for bespoke specifications for each project, making future Transmission Gully-type projects easier and cheaper to consent,” Parker said.
The system will eventually slash the more than 100 plans produced under the RMA to just 15 (one more than proposed two years ago), but it will still take years for the full system to be up and running.
The 15 plans will be rolled out incrementally across the country, meaning not every region will switch to the new system at once. Instead, it will be done gradually, with the Government putting up money to the councils and regions that move into the new system first.
Parker said the time taken to produce those plans will “reduce from 10 years under the current system to a maximum of four years”.
The Regional Planning Committees that will produce these plans will be made up of representatives from local government, mana whenua and central government. The committees must have at least six members on them, with no upper limit placed on membership. They must have at least two mana whenua representatives.
They will not be co-governed between government and mana whenua.
Protecting the environment
The existing RMA allows governments to make what are called “National Policy Statements” which set specific regulations around certain resources.
The NPS-UD, the new rules around housing density, is one such policy document. Others include regulations around freshwater use and highly productive land.
These stay, but will be incorporated into a “consolidated National Planning Framework”.
The focus of environmental protection will also shift.
Under the current model, environmental standards are met using an “effects-based approach”, which tries to ensure that the effects of any resource use are appropriately managed and mitigated.
The Government says the new planning rules will make consenting easier. Photo / Brett Phibbs
Parker said this system was not working.
“Put simply, an effects-based approach often saw many small adverse effects accumulate into significant environmental degradation - most notably with water quality and loss of biodiversity and top soil.”
The new regime will shift to a model that is “based on outcomes”.
“The NBA will focus on outcomes, setting limits to maintain current environmental levels and targets where degradation needs to be restored,” he said.
Planning (and strategising) and consenting
The NBA will introduce a National Planning Framework (NPF) and allow national-level policy direction on important areas of environmental policy. It will roll together the existing rules and documents set out by the RMA like National Policy Statements, National Environment Standards, the National Planning Standards and some 360 regulations made under the RMA.
This will act as a rulebook set out by central government for the regional planning committees to use when drawing up their own plans. It will be in place by 2025, in time for the first regional strategy.
The SPA will require regions to set out very long-term, high-level plans called Regional Spatial Strategies (RSS) that set out the challenges regions face in the next 30-100 years and how they might meet them through “high-level strategic direction”.
The Government expects these plans to be reviewed every nine years.
These strategies sit over the top of the more short-term NBE plans which are created by the NBA.
The NBA will require each region to draw up one of 15 Natural and Built Environment Plans (NBE plans) - Nelson City and Tasman District will not produce separate plans but one combined plan.
NBE plans replace existing regional policy statements and regional and district plans. Independent Hearing Panels, a similar process to the one used to put together the Auckland Unitary Plan, will hear submissions on the plan.
Local government will report back to the regional planning committees every three years with any issues in their plans.
The committee will use those reports to produce a three-year work programme that will implement any recommendations.
Every nine years, the RPC must also reassess the full plan to ensure it is still fit for purpose.
Consenting will be streamlined, giving greater certainty to people applying for a consent and reducing the number of consents that need to be notified.
A fast-track consenting process for significant projects that meet certain criteria was set up during the Covid-19 pandemic to stimulate economic recovery. Aspects of that fast-track process will be retained.
Associate Environment Minister Kiri Allan said existing Treaty settlements would be upheld by the new system. Photo / NZME
Water and other resources
The new regime will now require plans for managing scarce resources like water. The RMA gives councils this ability but they have not done so.
Parker said this system “has not delivered the best economic outcomes and can be unfair”.
“The new system will require regional planning committees to have an allocation plan.”
The plan would need to follow principles like “fairness, efficiency and investment, such as in irrigation systems, while creating a process to access water for those currently unable to secure it”.
“These changes ensure we get the best economic return from water rather than it being allocated on a first come first served basis. This builds on the work of Rt. Hon Bill English and moves towards solving water allocation issues in New Zealand,” he said.
A frequent complaint made of the current water allocation system is that the first-come approach has locked-out some people from making use of water resources. This is a particular complaint of Māori land users. It has meant that some land has been unable to reach its productive potential because it cannot be adequately irrigated.
The reforms were a joint-effort involving Finance Minister Grant Robertson, Housing Minister Megan Woods and led by Environment Minister David Parker. Photo / Mark Mitchell
What went wrong?
The RMA was drawn up by the outgoing fourth Labour Government and passed by the incoming fourth National Government in 1991, with slight changes from what Labour had proposed.
In the last decade a political consensus has emerged that the RMA was broken, but fixing it - or replacing it entirely remained elusive.
Parker said it contributed to “restrictive planning restraints” that have led to “New Zealand’s urban land prices and housing being among the least affordable in the OECD”, all while failing to adequately protect the environment.
Parker said that the RMA had become unduly complicated in the thirty years since its introduction.
“More than 20 major amendments and thousands of minor ones since the RMA was introduced have increased complexity,” Parker said.
“There is clear evidence resource consenting has become more costly, with council fees for notified consents more than doubling between 2015 and 2019. Costs for mid-sized infrastructure projects are up 70 per cent in the same period.
“New Zealand developers’ consenting costs of 5.5 per cent and total project costs are at the extreme end compared with the UK and the EU, where consenting costs are between 0.1 per cent and 5 per cent.
“Time to consent infrastructure projects increased by 150 per cent between 2010-22014 and 2015-2019,” he said.
Housing Minister Megan Woods said the new system would improve housing affordability. She said under a conservative estimate this would provide affordability “benefits” of between $146 million under a conservative scenario to $834.3m”.
Agriculture Minister Damien O’Connor said the reforms would give the agricultural sector “certainty” over resource allocation
“There will be clearer environmental limits and greater use of permitted activities that will not require a consent.”
Te Tiriti
Many Treaty settlements involve the management of resources. Upholding those aspects of a Treaty settlement was often done under the RMA.
The Government has been reviewing Treaty settlements to ensure they continue to be upheld by the new regime. Over 60 pieces of Treaty settlement legislation “interact” with the RMA in some way.
Associate Environment Minister Kiri Allan said the legislation will “uphold Treaty settlements, commitments and arrangements and ensure Maori maintain established decision-making and participation at both a regional and national level, which has been the case to date as a results of successive governments’ Treaty Settlement arrangements”.
One significant change to the national planning rules is the removal of amenity values as a matter with which the legislation must have regard to protecting.
Parker said that amenity values had “been the crutch on which a lot of NIMBY-ism has rested”
“We have taken it out of the higher national direction part of the act.”
Woods said this particular change was adopted from the housing accord Labour reached with National last year, leading to legislation to significantly increase urban density in cities.
Woods said the legislation would include “the ability to protect heritage, but it can’t be whole suburbs or whole streets”.
“It’s not saying that every piece of heritage in New Zealand is on the block,” she said.
The treatment of amenity values has been one of the most topical planning issues in recent years, with many proponents of development arguing that it has been used to block much-needed intensification in cities.
These reforms look familiar...
Parker kicked off the reform process in 2019 commissioning a working group led by retired judge Tony Randerson to investigate what was wrong with the RMA and how to fix it.
That group reported back in 2020 recommending the RMA be repealed and replaced with three pieces of legislation - the same legislation that is being unveiled today (the third piece will come next year).
Labour then campaigned on that model of RMA reform in the 2020 election.
It later released an “exposure draft” of the legislation and had a select committee investigate it.
The basic model of the RMA’s replacement has not changed drastically from what was proposed by the Randerson review in 2020. This is essentially the third time the public have seen them since they were first unveiled in 2020.
Parties from across the House took aim at the reforms. National was critical of the changes saying they would add more bureaucracy and prohibit development.
Leader Christopher Luxon noted that a frequent criticism of the existing RMA was that frequent amendments have made it too long - close to 900 pages - however, the two bills that will replace it are themselves of similar length.
The NBA bill is 833 pages, and the SPA bill is 58 pages.
Housing spokesman Chris Bishop agreed the RMA was broken, but said National was unhappy with the proposal.
“National’s simple test on RMA reform is whether it will make it easier to get things done - like building the houses New Zealand desperately needs and addressing our infrastructure deficit – while pragmatically protecting the environment,” Bishop said.
“We will be carefully considering the Bills but we are deeply sceptical that Labour’s reforms will meet this test,” he said.
Bishop said more “centralisation, bureaucracy and control is not the answer. We need to make it easier for Kiwis to get things done. That means giving New Zealanders the certainty as to what they can and can’t do on their land, and reducing the need for the bureaucratic rigmarole we have at the moment and the ability for planners to hold up legitimate development”.
National’s preferred option for resource management reform was one dating back to Judith Collins’ time holding the RMA reform portfolio. Her proposal was for one bill to manage resources in urban areas, geared towards development, and another for managing resources in natural areas that need more protection.
One criticism made against this model is that it would lead to even more red tape and regulation because it would lead to two different resource management systems, some of which may overlap. The merit of the RMA and its proposed replacement, defenders say, is that it wraps up all resource management into one system.
Act leader David Seymour said the two bills were a “retread” of the RMA, and also decried what he saw as aggressive centralisation.
“Like Labour’s healthcare, polytechnic, and three waters reforms, the reforms are more focused on the administrative structure for Government employees than the outcome for people. Taking 100 plans down to 15 sounds great, but the content of these plans will be little changed because we are saying a change in administration rather than a change of principle,” Seymour said.
“Centralisation is unpopular because it often fails. The reality of this reform is that a new and more centralised bureaucracy will write plans with different headings but the same basic content. Little really changes from the point of a property owner,” he said.
