Council to welcome back IANZ assessors

Assessors from International Accreditation New Zealand will return to Christchurch in November to check on progress with consents processing.

Building Control and City Rebuild Director Peter Sparrow confirmed the return visit today when he delivered his monthly report to the Regulation and Consents Committee. Representatives from IANZ will be doing a follow-up to the initial assessment for accreditation as a Building Consent Authority which was conducted in July.

“At the initial assessment in July, a large team from IANZ found a small number of areas where we needed to make changes to our building control processes and documents. Our project team has been working on these and the purpose of the November assessment is to review how we have implemented the changes.”

There will be a smaller team of one assessor and three technical experts on site for up to five days. After completing their assessment they will have 10 working days to report back on their findings.

Today’s report to the Committee notes the shorter working month combined with staff training and implementation of new systems and processes for the accreditation work impacted on statutory compliance with 74 per cent of consents granted within 20 days.

The report also notes that the Council registered its highest monthly total for commercial consents with 111 granted. Of these 33 per cent were processed within the 20-day statutory timeframe.

“Commercial consents can be complex and we are currently processing double the number of consents we were processing in January," Mr Sparrow says.

“We are in a unique situation with the rebuild of Christchurch and seeing unprecedented demand for building consents. Often we need to suspend consents and go back to the customer for further information and in August all commercial consents needed to have more detail provided. Our staff are working hard to contact applicants and their designers to ensure these gaps in information don’t translate into delays for owners.

“We advise customers to meet with us well in advance before lodging their consent to discuss any questions they may have so their application is complete when submitted.”

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