Jennian Homes welcomes Government’s move to improve housing affordability

Jennian Homes’ director Richard Carver has welcomed the Government’s move to amend the Resource Management Act (RMA) and Local Government Act in an effort to provide greater access to affordable land for residential construction, saying it’s an important step in improving housing affordability and supporting the building industry.

“Providing greater access to affordable land is not only the right economic decision—both for individuals and the country as a whole—it’s also what people want.

“High density housing would diminish the quality of life and sense of community that are a part of who we are as a nation, and there’s plenty of land suitable for residential development”. Mr Carver says there is great potential for residential and service development between Auckland, Hamilton and Tauranga in particular.

He says moves to reduce the time and cost of building consents for new homes would benefit both the industry and homeowners.

“Under current legislation it can take months to achieve building consent. This unproductive waiting time through long drawn-out processes is disruptive and frustrating to all parties, increasing costs and making planning difficult.

“Jennian supports the Productivity Commission’s recommendation in the Housing Affordability Inquiry document that the Department of Building and Housing should review the MultiProof building consent process with a focus on identifying barriers to its application and uptake, and suggest ways to overcome these barriers.”

Mr Carver also advocates a move to electronic consenting, which he says would make the process of achieving consent more cost effective and efficient.

“Applying for building consent electronically is a logical step. It’s counterproductive to be providing boxes and boxes of physical documentation in person at Council. Submitting information electronically would speed up the consenting process, reduce costs and ensure greater accuracy.”

Mr Carver says Prime Minister John Key’s comment on TVNZ’s Breakfast— labelling the process of achieving resource consent “arduous” and costly to the consumer—is accurate and he hopes this will be addressed.

He said the biggest barriers to housing affordability were a lack of access to affordable land, high consent fees and the excessive restrictions of the RMA.

Mr Carver said Jennian Homes was working with Housing New Zealand on its Tamaki Transformation project, also designed to improve affordability.

ENDS

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