Christchurch City Council regains building consent accreditation

  • Breaking
  • 17/12/2014

The Christchurch City Council (CCC) has regained its status as an official building consent authority after losing it in an embarrassing fiasco 16 months ago.

The council, slammed over lengthy delays and poor quality work, has been battling to regain the status since July 2013 when it was revoked by International Accreditation New Zealand (IANZ).

Mayor Lianne Dalziel described the decision as the "best Christmas present a mayor could ever ask for" at a media conference this morning.

"The amount of work that has gone into making this happen has been absolutely extraordinary from start to finish," she said. "I always said the loss of accreditation was a failure of management and governance.

"But the accreditation says the management is now in place and we've put the governance structure in place to make sure we never allow this to happen again."

Minister of Building and Construction Nick Smith described the decision as a "significant step" in rebuilding confidence in the council.

"The advice I've had from officials is there were deficiencies and problems in the building consent service of the city council prior to the earthquakes but with that huge tsunami of additional consents [following the quakes] it really fell apart."

Christchurch City, which was the first council ever to lose accreditation, has continued processing consent requests under the guidance of appointed Crown Manager Doug Martin.

Almost 10,000 building consents have been granted between January and November this year, with a total value of $2.7 billion, a marked increase on the 7266 consents granted in 2013.

Mr Martin will end his appointment on December 31 and says the council is up to the job.

"I think the biggest change has been to put a talented leadership team in to the building control group," he says.  "In many respects while the loss of accreditation was quite spectacular the actual root cause was quite conventional, a failure of leadership and management within the organisation.

"My one sleepless night was that we wouldn't get the people coming forward for the job but we did, and we even had a few in our back pocket as well, so that's been a key thing."

The Crown Manager will provide a report to several senior ministers explaining lessons from his appointment, and the experience will be passed on to other areas of government.

Mayor Dalziel says the council was forced to add $10 million to its budget as it reinvented parts of its leadership, updated information systems and recruited new specialist staff to keep up with demand.

"It has been a significant cost but it's been an investment and it has been worth it," she says.

"But even beyond the financial cost it's the loss of confidence, it's the loss of capacity to actually process consents in a timely and effective way that actually hold up the rebuild.

"This wasn't a case of re-accreditation, people need to understand we have gone through a building consent authority accreditation process from scratch, banking nothing from what was there before."

IANZ plans to do a standard accreditation assessment of the council in August 2015.

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source: newshub archive