Rodney District Council is on track to be one of the first Councils in New Zealand to be reaccredited as a Building Consent Authority.
Reaccreditation will allow the Council to continue to process building consents, providing local property owners and developers with a convenient local service.
As part of the reaccreditation process the Council had to meet tough new quality assurance standards.
The Council was independently audited as part of this process and the auditors noted that the building consent team, “had expended significant effort on the accreditation process.”
Customer Services Director Lloyd Barton says that for Rodney this was less of a challenge than for other Councils still working to be reaccredited.
“At Rodney we have had quality assurance systems in place for a number of years so it was a matter of reviewing and improving our existing standards, rather than starting from scratch.”
He says that the Council offered to work with the Department of Building and Housing to meet the quality assurance requirements in advance of the deadline in order to assist the Department to spread their workload.
As part of the reaccreditation review, a number of further actions were identified which the Council needs to address before July in order to complete the reaccreditation process, the majority of which are minor. No actions were identified relating to the Quality Management System, which is one of the more difficult sections to achieve.
As a Building Consent Authority the Council is responsible for enforcing building code standards introduced through the Building Act in 2004. New standards were introduced by the Government as a result of problems relating to leaky homes and national building code standards at the time.
Another requirement of the Building Act that the Council is currently working on is to complete inspections of buildings where the process of obtaining a building consent was initiated some time ago but building work has not been completed.
“The Council is required to notify people who applied to us for a building consent over 2 years ago but who have not completed their works that they need to apply for a final inspection,” says My Barton.
“We have now notified customers who are in this position and are working on arranging re -inspections of buildings.”
“We appreciate the response from people who have contacted us to follow up about this issue and we hope to be able to complete their inspections over the next couple of months,” he adds.
For further information and comment please contact:
Lloyd Barton or Chris Boggs
Rodney District Council
Phone 0800 426 5169 Lloyd.barton@rodney.govt.nz chris.boggs@rodney.govt.nz