Shining a light on building consent delays

MBIE has released new data looking at the performance of local authorities in processing building consents and code compliance certificates (CCCs). The data is part of the government’s broader push to improve and streamline the consenting system, to try and reduce construction costs and address housing affordability. This article highlights some of the key features of the data and looks at some of the best and worst-performing councils during 2024.

Consenting authorities are required by law to issue building consents and CCCs within 20 working days of the application being received, noting that authorities can go back to the applicant with a request for further information, at which point the clock stops. Chart 1 shows the proportion of applications to local councils during 2024 that were responded to within the legislated timeframe.

Firstly, some bouquets: Far North achieved a 100% response rate within 20 days, with the 2,106 applications processed the 18th highest for any local council across the country. Other local authorities to achieve 99% or higher were Mackenzie, Waitaki, Ōtorohanga, Rangitikei, Kawerau, Hamilton, Carterton, and Buller.

At the other end of the spectrum, several local authorities fell well short of their targets. Chart 2 shows the response rates within 20 days for selected areas that performed poorly across several cuts of the data. Applications in Chart 2 are broken down into building consents, CCCs, residential applications, and non-residential applications, showing the worst quarter for each local authority area last year. For example, in Horowhenua, just 25% of non-residential applications (covering both building consents and CCCs) were returned on time in the June 2024 quarter.

There are several factors that can potentially affect a council’s performance in processing consents. If a council has a higher-than-usual workload in terms of consent processing, the data suggests it will typically have a higher proportion of applications that run past deadline. The greater the proportion of Category 3 (C3) buildings (more complex structures, generally over 10m in height) also leads to a higher proportion of applications that do not get processed within 20 days.

For these reasons, some leeway might be given to lower processing performance in Tauranga, Wellington, and Christchurch, which all had large consent totals and high proportions of commercial C3 buildings (Napier also had a relatively high proportion of the latter).

However, these factors do not fully excuse the below-par outcomes, given the performance of some areas not shown in Chart 2. Hamilton achieved a processing performance pass rate in the top 10 with high consent volumes and a large proportion of commercial C3 buildings, while Dunedin and Queenstown-Lakes also performed creditably given the workloads they faced.

Among the data were a few other nuggets of information. MBIE noted that 64.3% of applications had a request for further information (RFI), with applicants taking a median of 11.6 days to respond to these requests. Across the country, applications without RFIs took a median of six days to process, compared to 11.4 days for applications with RFIs. The median elapsed time for applications with RFIs, from submission to response was 25 working days, once the RFI response time is taken into account. In a statement from Building and Construction Minister Chris Penk accompanying the data’s release, he stated that this length of delay could cost around $4,000 per dwelling. He also hinted that councils were deliberately extending processing times by requesting additional information.

Part of the government’s multi-pronged approach to reducing housing costs and improving housing affordability is a reform of the building consent process, which includes enabling self-inspection by suitably experienced builders, and restructuring building consent authorities to achieve greater standardisation across the country.

Although Chris Penk was critical of the delays associated with the consent process that the data revealed, there was one small positive to emerge from the numbers. Across the various categories of application, at least half the councils recorded an improvement in the proportion of on-time processing between the March 2024 and December 2024 quarters. The worst results in the December quarter were also all better than the worst results in the March quarter.

By turning the spotlight on delays, it appears that the government is already starting to achieve more timely outcomes in the consenting process. However, if you thought the building consent process was prone to delays, Chart 3 demonstrates that resource consents are in another league entirely!

The government will be hoping that its replacement of the Resource Management Act will reduce the incidence of people needing to apply for resource consent, decrease the complexity of required applications, and increase the efficiency with which those applications can be processed.