Taking big building consents off councils will increase risks, not reduce costs
OPINION: As Building and Construction Minister Chris Penk talks up a single building consent authority for large commercial projects, New Zealanders should ask if this is serious reform or another attempt to blame consenting for failures that sit elsewhere.
Under the proposal, large and complex buildings would be consented and signed off by a centralised authority, leaving council building consent authorities (BCAs) to focus on smaller builds.
The political appeal is obvious. Faster building, lower costs and a more efficient consent system sound great. But slogans aren’t evidence. So far, the minister has produced little to show that local council consent authoritiess are the cause of delays in large-scale commercial construction, or that a centralised model would deliver better.
The facts tell a different story. New Zealand’s building consenting system already performs strongly by international standards. Councils must process consent applications within statutory timeframes; many already handle large commercial work, and building surveyors are trained across competency levels from residential to complex commercial. That’s not a broken system. That’s a safeguard doing its job.
There may be a case for specialist national consenting capability for rare and complex projects such as hospitals, prisons, dams and airports. But using those outliers to justify centralising the wider commercial sector is a risky leap.
Building has certainly become slower and more expensive than it needs to be. But the causes sit well beyond the consenting system. The real cost drivers are in development financing, planning constraints, material supply, product pricing and the variable quality of inputs from parts of the design and construction sector.
Building consent authorities are frequently blamed for project delays and costs that are caused by poor quality consent applications and failed inspections. That’s clear in the data. According to 2023 Model Docs research, 80% of building design applications failed and 50% of inspections failed. That’s from poor quality inputs from designers and builders, not BCAs being tardy.
Rather than being an obstacle, building consent authorities are one of the few building quality safeguards consumers have. If policymakers want to be clear on the source of problems, they should continue to publish clear data on information requests and inspection failures, not weaken the independent check that protects building owners and occupiers.
A single large commercial BCA would not magically remove risk. But it could reduce competition, strip local knowledge from decisions, weaken council capability and concentrate too much influence in one organisation.
If it was profit-driven, the public would be right to question whether commercial incentives really belong alongside decisions about safe, compliant and durable buildings.
Kāinga Ora offers a warning. It entered the consenting market with significant resources and then recruited skilled consenting staff from existing BCAs, duplicating effort rather than strengthening the system. A new centralised commercial authority could do the same; drain experience out of councils, reduce their income and leave them thin on capability to deliver statutory services.
Centralisation won’t make consenting work disappear. Project information memorandum (PIM) requirements will still need to be met, consent application assessed, qualified staff retained and compliance checks completed. Will shifting location make it shorter, cheaper or better?
Commercial building consent costs are a small share of total project costs. Larger costs lie in development, resource consent, infrastructure contributions, finance, planning processes, material supply, long supply chains, and inconsistent skills across parts of the sector.
The danger is that centralised consenting becomes a political soundbite dressed up as carefully tested reform. If the real issues are elsewhere then Government should say so and fix them directly.
New Zealand needs reform that improves productivity and capability across the whole building process – including developers, designers, builders, contractors and suppliers whose work shapes quality and cost long before an application ever reaches a building consent authority.
Blaming building consenting is politically convenient, but it will not fix the deeper issues. Continuous improvement is already built into BCA accreditation. Weakening local consenting capability without clear evidence of benefit will create more problems than it solves.
Government should not mistake centralisation for reform. A better system will come from stronger capability, clearer accountability and better-quality inputs, not from stripping independent responsibility away from local authorities that are already performing well to protect building standards and consumers.
