Media Release

4 July, 2007

Thumbs up for 80% on time

Waitakere City Council has delivered 80% of building consents on time for over a month.

This reflects the upgrading of the Building Consent team‘s day to day functioning in the run-up to the city’s accreditation as a Building Consent Authority (November 2007).

The 80% delivery compares favourably with a level of 23% earlier this year.

“The Building Consent team has focused on improving statutory time-frame performance and we are very proud of the fact that we have managed to achieve, and sustain over the past month, this 80% performance,” says Grant Gillard, group manager, regulatory.

“A number of initiatives around performance improvement have been put into place and these have shown a steady increase in service delivery over the past three months; a trend that we expect to continue and will work on as we progress towards our accreditation.

“We are conscious that an improvement in statutory time-frame must also be balanced against delivering a quality of service. Neither of these components will be compromised within our processing, and customer service, functions,” says Mr Gillard.

The project to attain accreditation as a Building Consent Authority (BCA) began in March 2007.

Last month the city formally applied for BCA accreditation from International Accreditation New Zealand (IANZ) acting for the Department of Building and Housing.

Feedback from a preliminary audit has been very encouraging says Mr Gillard.

“We have had an excellent response from IANZ to our original application. The team has been absolutely delighted that such a large quantity of work has been graded as having only a very few minor adjustments that need to be made."

Now the council’s BCA team is preparing for an on-site assessment of the technical competency of Waitakere’s Building Consent systems, processes and people, relating to tighter building regulations.

“The challenge is to prove our competency, keeping in mind that, as a council, we are preparing a guide for the building industry to adhere to in the future. By 2010, all players in the building game must be accredited.

“While some clients are questioning the additional rigour applied to their applications the majority of customers I’ve spoken to are increasingly pleased with Waitakere's consent performance,” says Mr Gillard.

ENDS

For more information visit: http://www.waitakere.govt.nz/cnlser/bl/bc-authority.asp

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