Building and Construction Sector (Self-certification by Plumbers and Drainlayers) Amendment Bill

Third Reading Hon JAMES MEAGER (Minister for Hunting and Fishing) (20:47): on behalf of the Minister for Building and Construction: I move, That the Building and Construction Sector (Self-certification by Plumbers and Drainlayers) Amendment Bill be now read a third time. This bill is a key part of the Government’s reform programme to make building in New Zealand easier, faster, and more affordable. It reflects a deliberate shift away from unnecessary processes towards a smarter and more proportionate regulatory system that focuses effort where it is genuinely needed. For too long, inefficiencies in the building consenting system have contributed to higher costs, delays on building sites, and frustration for homeowners, councils, and the construction sector alike. This bill responds directly to those issues by cutting red tape, easing pressure on building consent authorities, and placing responsibility where it can be exercised most effectively: on qualified and experienced construction professionals. The bill makes targeted but substantive changes across two Acts to streamline the consenting system and ensure regulatory resources are used where they add the greatest value. It is about improving outcomes rather than expanding regulation and about ensuring the system works in practise as well as it does on paper. The current consenting system has often been characterised by delays, inconsistent practices, and risk-averse behaviour that slows projects and drives up costs. Capacity constraints within building consent authorities, combined with a framework that discourages professional accountability, have created unnecessary friction through the building process. This bill tackles those inefficiencies head on by shifting parts of the assurance system away from building consent authorities and enabling trusted professionals to self-certify certain work. It removes red tape, shortens time frames, and supports a construction sector that can deliver more homes at lower costs. Importantly, this reform does not diminish the role of building consent authorities. Instead, it allows them to use their somewhat limited resources more efficiently by focusing attention on more complex work that warrants greater oversight. Taking a targeted approach strengthens the system as a whole while removing burdens where they are unnecessary. This is a pragmatic reform that recognises the expertise that already exists in the sector and makes better use of it. The purpose of the bill is to introduce an optional self-certification scheme for approved plumbers and drainlayers. Under the scheme, endorsed professionals will be able to take responsibility for their own work, while maintaining strong consumer confidence that the work will be consistent with both the building consent and the building code requirements. Removing the need for building consent authority assurance for certain plumbing and drainlaying work addresses one of the most common causes of delay on construction sites. It delivers immediate time and cost savings for certain plumbing and drainlaying work, without compromising on quality or safety. The scheme itself will be fully integrated into the existing consenting framework. Plumbing and drainlaying work will still require a building consent, and building consent authorities will continue to play a critical role at the front end of the process. Councils will still assess the overall building design, including the plumbing and drainlaying design, to ensure that it meets building code requirements before granting consent. What does change is how compliance for certain categories of plumbing and drainlaying work is assured during construction. Consent applications will be required to state whether plumbing or drainlaying work will be self-certified. This provides early clarity for building consent authorities, allowing the authority to issue a suitable inspection schedule, and allows parties to be clear on responsibilities throughout the build process, ensuring improved transparency from the outset. Once the work is complete, the endorsed professional will issue a certificate of compliance confirming that the work complies with the building consent. Building consent authorities must accept that certificate as evidence of compliance when issuing the final code compliance certificate for the project. All very important and technical work, I’m sure. In doing so, councils are protected from liability for self-certified work, and responsibility and accountability are placed clearly and appropriately on the professionals who have carried out or supervised that work, Mr Foster. This clarity reduces administrative burden and supports faster decision-making, while encouraging a strong culture of professional ownership in the work. Excuse me, I’ve got a frog in my throat. ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Teanau Tuiono): Your pipes are clogged up there, Mr Meager. Hon JAMES MEAGER: The scheme is expected to apply to the majority of plumbing and drainlaying work in buildings of three stories or less. This presents a significant opportunity to remove inefficiencies from the consenting process, reduce delays on construction sites, and lower the overall cost of building. It will be particularly beneficial in rural and provincial communities—where travel times and inspector availability can significantly delay inspection—and in high-growth areas where council capacity is under pressure. The effectiveness of the scheme will depend on clear and well-designed regulations. Gosh, there’s a lot to this bill, isn’t there! Officials have been working closely with the board, industry groups, insurance providers, and building consent authorities to ensure definitions setting out the scope of the scheme are broad enough to add real practical value to the sector. Regulations will set out clear and simple criteria, making it easy to tell whether work is self-certifiable, while managing risks by excluding complex work. There will be robust standards for self-certifying professionals, as well as transparency, oversight, and enforcement. That is central to maintaining confidence in the scheme. Certificates of compliance issued by self-certifiers must be lodged with the Plumbers, Gasfitters, and Drainlayers Board and recorded on a register, parts of which will be publicly accessible. Territorial authorities will also retain copies of certificates as well as part of property files. The board itself is given expanded monitoring and audit powers enabling it to audit both self-certifiers and the certificates they issue. Where issues are identified, the board will have a graduated range of disciplinary tools available, including imposing fines, suspending or cancelling endorsements, or taking other appropriate action, and failure to lodge a certificate of compliance will itself be a disciplinary offence, with penalties of up to—wait for it—$10,000. The Minister for Building and Construction is also progressing a bill to strengthen occupational licensing regimes for licensed building practitioners—that’s something I’m sure is of much interest to Mr Luxton—electrical workers, plumbers, and drainlayers. The bill will support self-certification by plumbers and drainlayers, giving the relevant board registrars additional powers to initiate investigations more easily and introducing codes of ethics to promote professional standards. This means even further accountability for practitioners and more redress options for the consumer. This bill has benefited from careful consideration through the parliamentary and select committee process, and I want to acknowledge the Transport and Infrastructure Committee for its diligent work. What a hard-working committee it is. The committee of the whole House also made several targeted recommendations that have improved the clarity, workability, and implementation of the bill without changing its fundamental policy direction. One key change was the removal of restrictions under the previous clause 45A to enable a broader and simpler scope for self-certifiable work. Allowing for a simpler scope of work makes the declaration that the work meets the technical definition of “self-certifiable” unnecessary. Requiring a declaration added complexity to the consent process, and removing this requirement will simplify consent applications for those using this scheme. This bill strikes the right balance. It removes unnecessary red tape, improves efficiency across the construction sector, and makes it faster and cheaper to build, while maintaining strong safeguards and strong consumer protections. It encourages professional accountability, allows councils to focus on the more complex work, and delivers practical real-world improvements that will be felt on building sites across the country, and, for those reasons, I commend the bill to the House. ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Teanau Tuiono): The question is that the motion be agreed to. ARENA WILLIAMS (Labour—Manurewa) (20:55): Thank you, Mr Speaker. This is a bill which Labour supports, and supports with the knowledge that the select committee has worked through very diligently, under the chairmanship of Andy Foster from New Zealand First, in a cross-partisan way that has brought together the submissions of the industry, of homeowners, and of others within the building and construction sector and, as the Minister says, has drawn the right balance between putting part of the plumbing industry on speed rails and also ensuring that there are appropriate consumer protections. I will come back to those consumer protections. They are the part that this Parliament must be focused on in future. We must ensure that work on the appropriate insurance arrangements throughout the sector are a core part of this set of building reforms. This is a set of building reforms that the Government has embarked on, some of it continued on from the occupational licensing changes that a Labour Government undertook. But when you look at the state of the industry now, something has to improve for the plumbers. There are 4,900 plumbing businesses around New Zealand; 98 percent of them are small businesses, and an average of 2.6 employees is what you’ll see in these businesses. These are businesses that some MPs around the House will not have been able to meet with, even if you wanted to, because they are not set up to host MPs to talk about regulations. They are not the kind of people who can come to us with a well-equipped lobby group or lawyers to represent them. They are often mum and dad business owners who have employed maybe one or two people. They are hard-working small-business owners, and they want to have a regime which works for them. I was struck, working through this bill, by just how expert many of these people who were one- and two-man bands were about the regulations. There’s something in that that we need to tease out. When we look at the productivity of a sector like plumbing in New Zealand, it is incredibly important. Construction represents one in five jobs in New Zealand when the economy is performing well. And so plumbers and drainlayers and gasfitters represent a large proportion of that. Some Motu research that was done quite recently compared the productivity in the sector to that of the 1970s and found that not only had their not been growth in the productivity of the sector since then—through things like adoption of new tools, although there has been that, and new ways of working and more efficiencies—in fact, productivity in the sector has stayed at about the same rate. What can we learn from that? There are a couple of things. One of the things that the research pointed to was this domination in New Zealand by such small firms—as something we need to learn from. These plumbers who I spoke to—I got to get on the roof with one, to really understand how solar water systems were being installed. I definitely was the one who asked to get on the roof. He did not offer to get me on the roof, but I wanted to get up there and have a look. In another case, I met with a plumber who had installed grey-water systems in the Kāpiti District, and he was an absolute expert on not only the council’s rules but the central government’s rules on this. I raise this with you, Mr Speaker, because when we are talking about people who generally work with their hands—they are experts in their trade—they are also needing to become experts in complexity, because they have to negotiate through not only the regulations at the central government level but the local government level—and the interest groups who have different views to them and to their sector—in ways that choke off their ability to grow and scale— Cameron Luxton: Oh, this is brilliant. ARENA WILLIAMS: —in a way that you would expect other organisations to. And Cameron Luxton enjoys this abundance agenda from the Labour Party. I invite him to discuss it with me. What I’m getting to here, Mr Speaker, is that talking to these small-business owners is instructive and MPs around the country should do it, even though these plumbers will not be able to give them their time in the way that larger businesses and larger players in the industry will. And you’ll learn exactly how much these guys have to be experts in these rules. Complex societies, like the one we have created for ourselves, begin to reward those who can best navigate complexity. The challenge for us regulators who create within that complex zone is to make sure we’re also rewarding the people who can do the work to keep costs low and to ensure the work is getting done to a high standard. I think this bill goes some way towards doing that. What we have not addressed at the appropriate time is the way that protections will operate for small—the little guy in the situation, in this case, the homeowners who are left needing to apply to the council, needing to meet the costs of repairs, needing to be able to inspect things which are actually out of sight—they’re under the ground or they’re in the walls—and the appropriate protections that go along with an agenda of speeding things up is making sure that the appropriate person is bearing the costs that are being sacrificed in the quest for efficiency. The council has been taken out of this. The speed rails that the Government has created go straight from central government, to the professional, to the homeowner, and they have chosen the professional as the person in the chain of responsibility that their rhetoric has focused on. But, when you actually delve deeply into the legislation, and we got a chance to canvass this with the Minister last night, in fact, the protections that are meant to exist at the decision gates for the professional—that’s the plumber—are very quickly passed on to the homeowner. Actually, in the system that we have designed for ourselves, there are big liabilities that are associated with being the homeowner who is using the self-certification process. What does that mean? It means that we needed an insurance solution at the get-go that could be held by professionals who were in the situation of being able to offer these products. It also means that, if we don’t have that, who’s in the gun? It’s not the professional who has passed those on, in the legislation, largely. When the homeowner cannot repair or when there is a systematic failure across our housing system which compromises the whole housing market, we get a situation like 2011, but we have taken out the local authority in the middle. This is a bill that creates further future liability for central government. We must be clear-eyed about that. That is what we are sacrificing and trading off when we create a system where we shift parts of the assurance system on to professionals who can further shift it on to homeowners; that then becomes, in a system failure, a larger burden that we must meet collectively. This is the later part of the story. You’ve got to make sure that the little guy and central government are sharing that risk appropriately. It is not appropriate to, essentially, privatise the good things about the system and make sure that it is a profitable business for plumbers if you also socialise the risk. I don’t think most of the plumbers that I met with—the chap who got me his ladder out and showed me the hot water system—would expect the New Zealanders who he is transacting with, the little old ladies, to be bearing all of the risk in the system. It is not an industry that is set up for that. These are the people that we know; that we see at the school gate when we pick up our kids at the school. These are the people who we pass at the library getting books out on Sunday. These are people who also want what’s best for their community. They are community-minded people. Many of the successful ones sponsor not only industry awards but also things that are positive about their communities and that they can celebrate for a long time. These are people who also want to make sure that they are doing the right thing by New Zealanders, but we have created a system here which has left out a critical factor which is the appropriate spreading of that risk. Now, Mr Speaker, maybe I should get to my notes: the thing I want to very clearly say around this is that Labour has called for the appropriate safeguards. We have negotiated those with the committee. Many of those have been included at the select committee stage, and I am proud of the work that the Transport and Infrastructure Committee has done to be able to accommodate some of those things which make this both quick and efficient and also better for consumers, and to have more safeguards. There are things which we tried to include that have not been included, and so they remain outstanding concerns. The insurance product is not yet confirmed. The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment has advised us that it expects an insurance product to be available and the board is expected to set standards; the Minister was very clear on that. There will be a product required, but there is nothing in primary legislation which ensures that is ready to go when we know the Government is pressing forward on its change to proportionate liability, from joint and several liability. That is a critical piece of these reforms that should happen at the same time. We also advocated for scope expansion around some of the regulation that was intended to be moved at the committee stage. That was not something that we were able to see and work through. The House should keep checks on that because, when we move away from a model where local authorities are in the middle and one where central government is ultimately the insurer of last resort, we need to be responsible that the appropriate scope of work is included. There was also a call from Labour members and Green members to ensure that environmentally sustainable plumbing work was included in the scope of work. I was very glad to hear that the Minister included that, but we should push out on that. It’s unclear what the next thing will be, but there should always be a system incentive for those systems to be included in work, which is quicker, cheaper, and more efficient. What’s good for the planet is also going to help the economy. We should incentivise more training and more learning around these systems so that they are faster and easier to build. That is a good thing; that is something everyone in this House should be able to agree to, and so it is something we should press out on. I’m very happy to support this bill. Thank you to all plumbers who I bothered during the course of it. CELIA WADE-BROWN (Green) (21:06): Tēnā koe e te Māngai o te Whare. I rise to speak to the third reading of the plumbers, gasfitters, and drainlayers self-certification bill. Before this House considers the merits and the risks—and they are, you know; it’s in the balance—I want to take a moment to acknowledge the people the legislation is primarily about. Aotearoa New Zealand has nearly 28,000 registered plumbers and drainlayers. They’re not unskilled workers; entry to the trade requires formal apprenticeship of three to four years, on-the-job training, and technical study. That registration is mandatory and regulated under the Plumbers, Gasfitters, and Drainlayers Act. Many other practitioners hold a wide range of skills and a breadth of technical knowledge but they don’t exercise that knowledge in the comfort of an air-conditioned, well-watered Parliament. They are under our houses, they are on the roofs, and I do like to acknowledge my— Arena Williams: Get on the roof! CELIA WADE-BROWN: —colleague for going on the roof. I’ve maybe spent more time with plumbers under the house checking things out, and I actually have friends who are plumbers. Let us make no mistake that I might have a university education, but that doesn’t stop one having a range of friends. Every time something goes wrong with burst pipes, sewers, flooding—often outside business hours—those are our first responders. We rely on them being able to stop that leak before it goes through the ceiling to the next floor, to stop the bubbling up of the unmentionables, and to make sure that our baths, our showers, are hot but do not scald the babies. I would also like—as my colleagues have said—to thank the Transport and Infrastructure Committee, and its chair, Mr Foster, and also the submitters. There was a really wide range of submitters: there were councils; there were individuals. I’m going to shortly make a number of quotes from one in particular, but what I see as a fundamental flaw is the argument that the consequences of errors are confined to the property on which the work is done, and they are not. No property is an island. A failed drain, an incorrect cross-connection between sewage and stormwater, a poorly installed septic tank, or an undersized stormwater detention system—those failures flow on to neighbouring land, into the streams, into the harbour, into the sea. Of course, public organisations are not immune from mistakes and lack of monitoring. If a large organisation can fail, so can small businesses. When I was a councillor on the Wellington City Council, we had smoke testing to try and reduce the pollution into our streams. Now, smoke testing means that you have a coloured smoke that goes up the pipes and it should come out from the stormwater up through the drainpipes. Unfortunately, it does not always work that way. We found, for example, in the Ōwhiro Bay catchment, a huge number of cross connection. Now, some of those might have been naughty homeowners, but some of them might have been poorly trained apprentices, or some of it might have been bad inspections by councils, but some of those mistakes are not as rare as we would like. The thing about plumbing and drainlaying is it’s not something that’s very easily inspected once a building is complete. It might be under a concrete floor, it might be in lined walls, or it might be under a planting bed, so it’s very difficult to check until it fails, and then that’s too late to find out. It might be 15 years—we don’t know how long it could be until those things fail. The risks are increasing because with more and more climate-charged rainfall events, the margin for error in drainage is decreasing. It’s not acceptable to say, as my colleague from the ACT Party might, that people should be able to do what they like on their own land or under their houses. That argument only holds if the effects stop at the boundary. In plumbing and drainlaying, they rarely do. I’m going to move to this particular submission that, for me, carried particular weight. The person has been a certifying plumber and drainlayer, a former building consent authority plumbing and drainage inspector, and a former central government regulator, and their assessment is pretty direct. They say the proposal appeared to be driven more by political considerations than by a practical response to an identified problem within the building regulatory system. They remind us that plumbing and drainage systems are complex and largely inaccessible once construction is complete, and the consequences are health-related, environmental, and financial. Now, their submission also suggests that the current cost of a building consent authority inspection for a simple home is modest and proportionate. There is a question of whether self-certification is actually going to save much in the way of costs and time. I hope it’s not a mirage, but that promised insurance product, it’s got to be quite comprehensive. Supposing the plumber retires the year that he or she has done the work. That insurance product actually needs to continue for the life of the works, or for at least a reasonable time after they have retired. We don’t have that magic product yet, and that’s one of the reasons that we don’t feel convinced to vote for this bill. The submitter also noted that comparable jurisdictions—and it’s always challenging to see who we should compare ourselves with. Sadly, we almost only compare ourselves with anglophone countries. I suspect that if we had better Google Translate, we might be able to compare ourselves to a rather wider range of countries. But Australia, the United Kingdom, and Canada do not permit plumbers or drainlayers to self-certify plumbing and drainage work for new residential buildings. I think that should give us pause for thought. Not that those countries always get everything right, but why are we different in this case? Cameron Luxton: Because we’ve got a different inspection regime. Carl Bates: Ah, he’s answered it. CELIA WADE-BROWN: I look forward to listening in turn. I do want to acknowledge the Minister for Building and Construction’s genuine engagement with submitters, with members through the committee of the whole House. There have been some changes, but we are just unclear what is going to be coming in the regulations, how extensive they’re going to be, how sustainable the methodology that’s preferred will be, and that very, very big question of insurance. We remain unconvinced that the benefits outweigh the risks to public health and to private homeowners. We will vote against the bill despite recognising some improvements. CAMERON LUXTON (ACT) (21:16): Well, thank you Mr Speaker. I acknowledge the members of the House who have been on roofs and under houses with our erstwhile colleagues, the plumbers and drainlayers. I’ve worked with these professionals, and I have managed sites where I’ve had to organise subbies, including plumbers and drainlayers, and I can attest to this House that it’s not just the plumbers and drainlayers that get peeved with council inspections taking forever to look at just a simple joint at some low-risk standard plumbing work. It’s everybody up the chain and down the chain who’s being delayed because a council can’t get there and look at something so simple. Often the inspectors turn up from the council and say, “Yeah, it really isn’t worth my time coming out.” They’ll say that off the record, but I’ve heard many times that this is something that’s worthwhile. I congratulate the Transport and Infrastructure Committee, which I wasn’t able to take part of on this particular round, having a great go at it and bringing the bill to the House in the state it is, the Minister for Building and Construction for his engagement. But I have to say, it’s another one of the innovations that’s come out of this Government. We’ve got product substitution. Another thing that, oh my God, can it delay a site when you’re trying to just swap a brand name on the piece of stamped consented plans. Remote inspections, another great thing that’s come about in this term of Government. This is another thing—a majority of plumbing work on a building site simply needs to be allowed, to allow building professionals and licensed plumbers and drainlayers to be able to self-certify makes perfect sense. Can I just also have a shout-out to my fellow bush lawyers out there who learnt their trade on the tools, but also had to navigate the morass of rules and regulations and become self-certified bush lawyers to try and build a house in New Zealand in these heady days; in the complicated society we seem to have built, in the words of Arena Williams. There are other licensed building practitioners (LBPs) out there. Roofers, the foundation guys and girls, the bricklayers, the plasterers, site LBPs—I mean, design, I don’t know how much self-certifying you can do there, but maybe a little bit. There’s a lot to be done, and to my fellow LBP carpentry out there, one day we will be able to make sure that you’re seen as the trusted building professionals that you are as well. I commend this bill to the House. ANDY FOSTER (NZ First) (21:18): Thanks, Mr Speaker. Look, I rise on behalf of New Zealand First and also as chair of the Transport and Infrastructure Committee. I just wanted to start off by saying thank you to the select committee for your always diligent and collaborative work on this bill, as on so many others. We often talk about a housing crisis, and let’s reflect on what that means. We have not enough houses, maybe we have too expensive houses, maybe they’re not of good enough quality, but it’s a combination of those three things. This Government has done a lot, and this is one of those elements of this, to try and reduce the cost of actually building houses. Because you can’t just get say, “Well, what we’re going to do is try and jaw bone down the value of houses,” because if you do that, all you’re going to do is make it less attractive for people to actually build houses. Because the reality is if you can’t make money out of building houses, you’re not going to do it. The way in which we actually tackle this is by actually reducing the cost of building, and this is one of those initiatives to do exactly that. I do note that there are parties in this House who would actually like to increase the costs of building houses. They want to add capital gains taxes to them, they want to tax landlords, and they want to increase standards, all of which will make building housing less attractive. It will make it less attractive. It will make it less— Tangi Utikere: Long bow. ANDY FOSTER: No, it will make it less attractive, colleagues. What we need to do is reduce the cost of housing and actually deliver housing, and building consents are part of that. It’s not just the cost of the building consent, the dollars you sign off on the cheque; it’s also the delay, and that’s the thing that Cam Luxton was talking about. He will be more experienced about that than anybody else. I’m glad that Mr Speaker is not in the Chair, because he’d probably tell me off for saying that, but I’m sure that Cam Luxton would be the most experienced of us in seeing the delay and cost, and that delay is money. That delay really is money, so that’s what this bill is about. This bill allows self-certification by endorsed plumbers—not all plumbers; it’s endorsed plumbers and drainlayers. We already have the Plumbers, Gasfitters, and Drainlayers Act, and one of them is already able to do the self-certification; the other two are not. This is bringing them all into line with each other. What we heard during the submissions process—and we didn’t have many submitters; we only had 25 submitters, and we only heard from four of them, but we had quality submitters. What we heard from them is that they had to have at least seven years of training and experience, and I think we should respect that. That is what the message that we got was. Only some plumbers and drainlayers will be self-certifying. They have to be approved and endorsed by the board, and we also have many others who will be qualified plumbers but they will not be self-certifying, and then, of course—and there is one issue, the issue I raised with the Minister during the committee of the whole House—there will be others who will pass themselves off as plumbers but who are not. In conversation with the Minister, what became apparent is that we actually do have a gap in the legislation and, more possibly, the ability to be able to something about it when somebody fraudulently misrepresents themselves as something they’re not. That is something that I think we do need to pursue, but it is not relevant to this legislation per se. I note that what was said by Celia Wade-Brown in her speech is that there is an issue here about liability. That liability at the moment, of course—it doesn’t mean the people in the council, the building inspectors, are any better. In fact, they’re probably less qualified than the certifying plumbers. They’re certainly less current than the certifying plumbers, but what it does mean is that the ratepayer is the one who stands behind the product. This takes the ratepayer out of that and puts, essentially, the self-certification, the insurance that sits behind that self-certification, and there is an issue there—she is quite right about that. There does need to be a good, solid, robust insurance process, and also the board’s overview of both the plumber and of the certificates that are issued. The last couple of things I wanted to say are that we did have an excellent, collaborative process. We actually went through several conversations between Master Plumbers and the Plumbers, Gasfitters, and Drainlayers Board, the Minister, the officials, and the select committee to try and get the right outcome. Where we started was that the board and Master Plumbers said, “Actually, this is far too narrow. You’ve limited it to really, really simple stuff, and we think we should be able to do more.”, and we’ve reached a balance there that, we think, was the right balance. It was about trying to make sure that the scheme worked. Just to finish off, there are some risks. The key in this is to minimise, to mitigate, those risks. As I said, the self-certifying plumbers are really, really highly experienced. They are backed by the board process, the certification endorsement process. They have to lodge certificates with the board. The board can take disciplinary action if it decides that it needs to. Of course, if you’re a master plumber, you’ve also got Master Plumbers sitting there behind it as well. There is an insurance process, and that’s going to be one that I think we will need to keep a very close eye on. As I said, there is an identified gap around the potential for fraudulent misrepresentation—people who actually aren’t plumbers at all. There are always risks. I think the issue here is that the risks at the moment are covered by the ratepayer, and I have to say I think it’s really important that we take the ratepayer out of that. We have just got to make sure that there is a process there, and, as Arena Williams said, maybe the Crown needs to consider its role in supporting those so that it doesn’t just fall on the person who buys the product—the end consumer. I think we’ve done a lot of good work on this, and I think we’re going to need to pay some close attention to it going forward. It is about trying to reduce the costs of building for New Zealanders to help deal with the housing crisis. I commend this bill to the House. Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green—Rongotai) (21:24): Kia orana, Mr Speaker. The kind of tragedy of this whole Government is that, yes, we could be doing things to reduce the cost of building, but mostly they’re not doing them. The things that New Zealand could be doing, which the Green Party would love to see happen, are having the Government more involved in procuring homes, as they were with Kāinga Ora, and through that large purchasing power and procurement, we could be driving down the cost of sourcing materials, of using much more advanced building techniques that deliver better outcomes for New Zealanders, like warmer homes, less energy use, and less water wasted. It’s entirely possible. I’ve been to many countries that do that, but that’s not what this Government is doing. This Government did the exact opposite, and now they’re sort of fiddling around the edges, trying to reduce oversight and saying that’s going to reduce costs, when in reality we know it’s not really going to reduce that much cost, sadly. I totally agree that councils, which are mainly funded by rates, should not be on the hook for problems with substandard building work, and it would be better if we had a more centralised system with a Crown guarantee, and if there was more uniformity so it’s more predictable for builders and what the inspectors would be looking for. We still probably want a little bit more oversight than what is being proposed here. Critical details are being left to future regulations rather than being in the bill itself. We’re seeing that pattern with a lot of bills going through select committee at the moment, and it does make it difficult for us to support them. Interestingly, I’ve spoken with builders who don’t support the move to self-certification. They didn’t support removing building-consent requirements for small stand-alone dwellings, either. They’re builders who build to a really high standard, and they’re concerned that we’re not going to have the—I’m not saying the current system is delivering great quality of building all the time. But it would be good to focus on ways that would actually address that rather than—this is almost like deregulation signalling, to try and pretend. I know, it does seem very annoying, but, on the other hand, when things go wrong, people get very upset, so that’s why it’s useful to have systems in place to improve quality control. What I really want to speak about in this speech is the shocking over-regulation of bidets. This is a serious problem that the Minister for Regulation should really look into, because bidets, which are very common in other countries—other countries use a more civilised form of cleaning themselves after using the toilet, instead of buying packages of toilet paper made from trees, wrapped up in plastic, and then kind of, like, hoping they’re getting themselves clean. I have a constituent who recently raised this issue with me. The off-the-shelf bidet toilet seats that you can get are common in Japan. In South-east Asia, they have the separate hose option, which could be practical. All of these require, in New Zealand, high-hazard back-flow prevention devices, which cost thousands of dollars to install. You have a product that might cost $200 but to install it legally in New Zealand and be compliant, you have to spend thousands and thousands of dollars. It’s outrageous. And it’s not about self-certification. Even if there’s self-certification, it’s the requirement for the high-hazard back-flow prevention device. Yet that’s not required for your garden hose. The same problem is just as likely to happen, which is very, very unlikely to happen. It’s very, very rare that there would be some sort of syphoning effect from a garden hose left in the garden and maybe there was some animal waste there that got trapped and got syphoned into the drinking-water system. Like, that could happen, but it’s not— Cameron Luxton: Red tape. Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: Maybe Mr Luxton could take that to his party leader, who happens to be the Minister for Regulation, and try to deal with this issue of the over-regulation of bidets, which is preventing better hygiene in toilets in New Zealand. I think that would be a real win. Dr CARLOS CHEUNG (National—Mt Roskill) (21:29): This is a common-sense bill. This side of the House, this Government, has trust and confidence in our plumbers and drainlayers. This bill will save time, it will save construction costs, and it has strong support across the sector. I commend this bill to the House. TANGI UTIKERE (Labour—Palmerston North) (21:29): Kia orana, Mr Speaker. It’s a pleasure to take a call on this bill, and I’m surprised that the newly minted deputy chair of the Transport and Infrastructure Committee took what was less than 30 seconds, effectively, to outline the position of the Government around this, which seems to be a consistent approach. I want to acknowledge the work of the hard-working Transport and Infrastructure Committee. On this particular bill, the committee did receive, according to the report, 22 submissions, largely from industry participants and industry bodies, which meant that the committee was able to work through a number of issues that were traversed in the committee of the whole House stage last night. This will, as some members have said, change two pieces of legislation. One is the Building Act and one is the legislation that’s in front of us as it relates to plumbers and drainlayers. The Labour Party, as has been indicated by my colleague Arena Williams, our spokesperson for this area, will support this bill. There were a number of issues that were raised throughout this process, some of which have been identified in the bill that’s currently before the Parliament as a result of changes that were progressed by the Labour Party and supported by other parties as well, but there are still some elements that Ms Williams herself has indicated we’d like to see a little bit more strength in. There has been an assurance from the Minister for Building and Construction and from the Government that, as regulations are worked through, those issues will be sorted. It is important with any changes that might be promoted through this process that, yes, they are efficient where possible, but they’re also effective and they cannot compromise safety. That is a fundamental bottom line: that any changes to any regime, when it relates to building and construction, absolutely must not compromise safety. At the same time, it must not leave consumers or homeowners in a sticky or prickly situation as a result of that. Ms Williams has talked about the fact that many small businesses—around 96 to 97 percent of businesses in New Zealand are small businesses—and many for whom this law change will apply will fall within that particular definition. On the one hand, it might make it slightly easier to go about their business; but on the other hand, it’s important that that safety is not compromised and that the consumer, the homeowners, those that are residing in properties, are not left short. The process is simply that someone—and this is something, actually, the select committee did hear about and did change as a result of submissions—who is wanting to avail themselves of this particular process, in terms of an application that’s been made, the person—in this instance, the plumber or the drainlayer that is seeking to undertake the self-endorsed certification line of work—would be required to identify themselves at the time of application. Now, that is because it is possible that there might be changes in the person who is undertaking that work once the application is actually lodged and that this bill does provide for some change through that process. There also needs to be a declaration that is made—and it’s not a statutory declaration; this is something that we did talk to the Minister about last night. Is the threshold at the right level? This is really important because, if we’re having individuals that are professionals who have all the years of training that other members have already touched on, we need to make sure that when they make a declaration—just as anyone else would—there are consequences if that declaration is found to be false. Part of the issue that we sort of covered last night was whether—because it used to be a statutory declaration, now it’s just a declaration. The Minister has indicated that, no, that threshold is still met and that’s still sufficient. One of the changes that the select committee did promote was not just having a plumber or a drainlayer but broadening that to include a registered architect, a chartered professional engineer, or a specified licensed building practitioner, to ensure that that was capturing the range of options that might exist there. That broadening of that aspect of this bill is something that the select committee did in response to the submissions that it heard to also acknowledge the fact that, when some of this work is being done, they are specified professionals who should be able to be held to account as part of that process. Now, one of the interesting things that we learnt last night was that the select committee had an expectation from the Minister that Cabinet was going to undertake some approval process around broadening the scope of work that might be captured here. What we learnt last night from the Minister—and in the absence of any Amendment Papers—was that that suite of work had not been done at this point, but that it was to come. It’s a little bit difficult where the select committee has reported back to the House on the understanding that some work’s going to be done and then we get to this point and that’s not the case. Do we take the Minister at his word? That is a very high threshold and a lot of goodwill there. The preference would be that, actually, it is specified in the legislation to provide that there’s a level of protection for industry participants, whether they be those that are undertaking the work or indeed the people that own these homes and are having this work undertaken. One of the aspects that we’ve talked about previously is the introduction of a civil liability clause, and this was a change—this was not something that was in the bill when it was first sent off after first reading, but this is an important provision that will protect those who find themselves in a tricky situation. It is an aspect that the Labour Party, in earlier contributions in this House, had indicated that it wanted to see; we wanted to see the provision of liability so that homeowners, those who are having this work undertaken on their properties, would not be caught short. That is not an unrealistic or unreasonable expectation to hold, and it’s something that was put into the bill and something that we are quite keen obviously to see within that. One of the aspects that I’m really quite pleased with in this bill is in relation to the professional duties that the professional bodies would undertake. In any circumstance—whether someone is a medical professional, whether they are an engineer, whether they are a teacher—there are always professional bodies that, yes, have a discipline arm to it but that also have an obligation to ensure that professional standards and conduct are at a level that is appropriate to meet the needs of those within that particular sector. What we now see in this bill are some changes that reflect the fact that the professional body and organisation do have some tools to be able to go out and to initiate some sort of inquiry or audit—actually, “audit” is the word that is used—to ensure that there is a level of professionalism amongst practitioners that folk can expect they live up to. That is a particular change, in terms of the audits, that is a pleasing thing to see. One of the aspects around the endorsement process that I’m still not entirely convinced around is where a self-certification endorsement is authorised by the board. As the bill currently stands, if there is a term or condition that is imposed on a professional in this space, they could simply sort of time that out after a three-year period, not seek a renewal process but instead seek to have a new application. There’s nothing in the bill that would require the board to turn their mind to the fact that there were terms and conditions that were imposed previously. I do think that is somewhat of a gap. The preference, I think, would have been to have something in the legislation that required some form of reporting clause or something that would capture that fact and not rely on a kind of catch-all opportunity that the professional board could basically turn its mind to a range of things. Now, that is the view of the Minister; I hold a different view around that. It’s not in the bill, but hopefully if there are circumstances where someone who is subject to having previous terms or conditions imposed upon their licence or their ability to practise in a self-certified way—there needs to be a mechanism that that information is not lost and that that information finds its way to the professional board when they’re considering future applications. We hope that those numbers would be light, that they wouldn’t be right up there, but what we’re really need to ensure, from the Labour Party perspective, is that those safeguards are in place to ensure that there are protections that are available to those who might need to utilise them when they do it. Yes, this is seen as something that’s effective, it’s seen as something that’s efficient, but the bottom line from our perspective is that these changes need to be safe, they need to protect the consumer, they need to protect those whose properties this work would be done under, and that’s what we’d like to see. GREG FLEMING (National—Maungakiekie) (21:39): As the previous member, Tangi Utikere, said, these are effective changes; they are efficient changes. They are changes that have been dreamed of for some time by the by plumbers and drainlayers of Maungakiekie. I thank the Transport and Infrastructure Committee for its assiduous work on this. I’m excited for that dream to be granted, and I commend this bill to the House. Hon DAMIEN O'CONNOR (Labour) (21:39): Mr Speaker, thank you very much. Look, I was sitting in my office watching this debate—I hadn’t heard the debate last night; I was at other meetings—and I was somewhat alarmed. I’ve seen some faith-based legislation in this House before, but not recently. This is a faith-based piece of legislation, and I know that my colleagues, through the select committee, have done their very best to try and improve it, and, on balance, we need to try and reduce the cost of building, but this is of concern to me. There’s no one in this House who was around when this Parliament was trying to deal with leaky homes. I was around. In fact, I came in just after the Occupational Safety and Health legislation and the Building Act in 1991 came in. The Government of the day—National Government—came in wanting to lower the cost and deregulate. They deregulated health and safety and they deregulated building. I just want to put that on record, because I know my colleagues have done a great job in trying to improve this Government’s piece of legislation. There’s also the Associate Minister of Health responsible for plumbers and drainlayers. They said, “Why is it in health?” Well, people should be reminded that the basis of public health was actually plumbing. It started in London when you had open drains and people realised that disease was widespread and there needed to be a system of looking after water and waste water; so, plumbing is still at the heart of public health. We support the lowering of costs, wherever possible, but this is a bit of faith-based legislation, trusting that people will do the right thing. Now, for the most part, over the decades, Kiwis have been really good people, but for whatever reason, and through all, there have been people who cut corners. The pressure that has come, post the 1980s or thereabouts, on individual small to medium enterprises and individual tradespeople has been so intense, through competition. Usually competition drives efficiency—lowers cost, we’re told—but the temptation to cut corners has been such that we’ve had more people killed in workplaces and injured in workplaces because we trusted that the employer and the employee would work out what was safe and what wasn’t. People are dead because of the naive trust that systems can be developed through self-regulation. Leaky homes—the estimate is anything from $11 billion through to $47 billion of costs, where honest Kiwis thought they were getting a proper home built. Can I just say that, in spite of the improvements that have been made through this piece of legislation at the select committee—and I acknowledge my colleagues—if you have plumbing done that is not up to standard or is faulty, not only will you not be able to see it but you won’t be able to go back to a plumber or a business person who’s gone broke, who doesn’t have any bond or any proper insurance in place. The $47 billion that it cost honest Kiwis up and down this country through leaky homes could be repeated again because of this piece of legislation. The members over there who think that deregulation and lowering costs is great for everyone: go back and read a little bit of history. Go and talk to the widows of people who’ve been killed unnecessarily on work sites. Go and talk to the people who have spent millions of dollars doing up their buildings. When this piece of Government legislation is passed, it must come with a guarantee, in some way, that plumbers and drainlayers under pressure from either their businesses or the contracts or their employer don’t cut corners and leave people with buildings and homes that are deficient, defective, and, ultimately, cost them a fortune. This, for most people, seems like a piece of progress. It comes with a huge warning, and I say, and put in this House here, that, unfortunately, we will see, through human nature and commercial pressure and naivety, that means people cutting corners. MILES ANDERSON (National—Waitaki) (21:45): I rise to speak on the Building and Construction Sector (Self-certification by Plumbers and Drainlayers) Amendment Bill. For those people at home who just heard the last speaker, the Hon Damien O’Connor, you wouldn’t believe it but he’s actually supporting this bill, as I do, and I’ll commit it to the House. Dr TRACEY McLELLAN (Labour) (21:45): Thank you, Mr Speaker, and thank you for the opportunity. I’m going to take a call on the Building and Construction Sector (Self-certification by Plumbers and Drainlayers) Amendment Bill. I think there are a few more things that need to be said on this. I would like to reiterate the comments of my colleague Tangi Utikere, who was a little bit dismayed that some of the members across the Chamber haven’t really made contributions. The chair of the Transport and Infrastructure Committee, Andy Foster, made a bit more of a fuller contribution, as I would expect from him. It’s kind of a bit of a loss, because it’s at this stage where it’s the opportunity to sum up everything that we heard. It was a really interesting bill to be part of the select committee process on, for those of us who don’t have that lived experience like my colleague Cameron Luxton and who haven’t been, you know, under the house and done all the things they do under there—the experience of knowing the reality of the types of skills and the way in which not only are those skills applied but those businesses are run with those skills in mind. Being part of the select committee process was interesting. I felt like I learnt a lot of things, particularly from those industry experts who came in and were able to point out nuance, were able to point out that, while something might have sounded good on the surface, there was always potential for unintended consequences, and it was an interesting process. It would have been nice to have heard some fuller contributions from the people who were also there. One thing I think we can agree on—and yes, we will be supporting this bill. There is plenty in it to support. There could have been some things that were done differently. I also acknowledge the fact that it’s quite an unusual situation to be at this stage, now, having assumed or thought that the Minister was going to do some additional work on some of those points in relation to expanding the scope. Certainly, some of the submissions that we heard—you know, there was real rationale for some of that, not in so far as just expanding for the sake of it, but the way in which it fitted in with the overall picture. We are a little bit surprised, at this late stage, as of last night, to hear that work hasn’t, in fact, been done. I mean cutting costs is good, and I think we can all agree on that; cutting corners, however, is a whole other thing, and that is not good. Whilst there were some comments made from the other side of the House in relation to the previous speaker on this side of the House, I think it is worth noting that we should learn lessons from the past. Nothing ever works in a linear direction. There are always advances and lessons and all sorts of good things that progress, but that can go backwards really quickly if you don’t keep your eye on the types of rules and regulations and the types of contexts that afford for those opportunities to work well. The leaky homes saga—a catastrophe; trauma for a huge number of people—is one of those issues. I think that was a perfectly reasonable thing to bring up, because everyone wants faster, cheaper building, but when the Government pushes speed over safeguards—whether it’s public sector cuts, infrastructure shortcuts, deregulation without enough security—it’s no wonder that you have to keep your ears pricked and look out for things that could go wrong. We have supported this bill throughout this whole process, but we were very clear at the beginning stages that, whilst we supported it, we were super keen on some additional safeguards. The Transport and Infrastructure Committee did add some stronger audit powers, which is good. It did also add a public register and tighter standards after those concerns were raised. That just shows that scrutiny matters. Good legislation is often improved, I think, through a select committee process and through the work that is done by the select committee, and the opportunity and the affordance that select committees have to garner and be recipients of those submissions and the advice from other experts—so bear that in mind as we head into another round of urgency. If councils step back, homeowners still need protection. I think one of the things that has been somewhat left—not unsaid and not under-investigated, but there hasn’t been as much meeting of the minds as we would have hoped, to have been able to influence through the select committee process. That’s the fact that, sure, councils may no longer be inspecting some plumbing and drainlaying work, but homeowners themselves still need clear ways to get defects fixed if they do emerge. I think everybody could relate to the fact that—if we’re talking about a residential property and a family who have discovered some defective plumbing after the walls have been closed up—it becomes incredibly expensive and stressful to go about doing that. It’s all very well for the Government wanting to shift that responsibility away from the State and councils, but it is incumbent upon us to make sure that there are still protections—and also for those tradespeople. They shouldn’t be carrying all of that risk alone themselves. Plumbers and drainlayers, whilst they hold major professional responsibility, if the liability is expanded, there has also got to be proper insurance products and proper insurance support available so that they can protect themselves. Many of them are small-business owners—small tradies running family-owned businesses—and one dispute or a defect claim too many and, all of a sudden, they could get themselves into difficulty as well. The insurance products still aren’t locked in. A workable insurance product was identified by the committee itself as a kind of critical, cross-party—something that we could have all agreed on. There’s still some unanswered question in that regard, and I think that was a little bit of a missed opportunity. The Minister for Building and Construction wants, so we understand, to expand the scheme and had certainly signalled that that was going to happen. I don’t know—maybe we’ve still got one more call from the National Party before the conclusion of this bill, and maybe we might hear some more details about what happened there. Hon Rachel Brooking: Really? Very optimistic. Dr TRACEY McLELLAN: Efficiency matters, and accountability matters as well—it is optimistic, but there is still one call, and a little bit more time left as well. We do agree that efficiency matters, and we do agree that people want to have building costs reduced. That’s the ideal, but we do need to find a way to do that that is safe and workable for everybody so that homeowners don’t bear the brunt of that if things go wrong, and so that tradies themselves aren’t the ones in the firing line, so to speak, if that doesn’t go well. We do think, whilst we support this, that it would have been nice for (a) the Minister to have completed that work and (b) for some of those suggestions that were made during the select committee process—and that were also reiterated at the committee of the whole House stage—to have happened. Tangi Utikere: It’s a very collegial committee. Dr TRACEY McLELLAN: It was a very collegial committee. Finally, I would like to thank all those people who did make submissions. It was really informative. I would like to acknowledge the work of the select committee, as we often say, my colleague Tangi Utikere and I, and commend the select committee—very well chaired by Andy Foster, who’s over there and keeps us on our toes— Tangi Utikere: Got a new deputy chair. Dr TRACEY McLELLAN: —and keeps things moving—there’s a new deputy chair, of course. Tangi Utikere: He didn’t say much tonight. Dr TRACEY McLELLAN: He didn’t say much tonight, but we welcome his appointment as the deputy chair of the hard-working Transport and Infrastructure Committee, and we commend this bill to the House. TIM COSTLEY (National—Ōtaki) (21:55): Oh, a little bit of criticism there from the last member for members on this side not saying enough, and yet she managed to talk for almost 10 minutes and say nothing at all. We had Arena Williams, who was on a roof; we had Celia Wade-Brown, who was under the floor with the plumber; we had Julie Anne Genter, who was sitting on a bidet and wanted everyone else to be sitting on a bidet, in one of the most out-of-touch speeches I’ve heard; and then we had Damien O’Connor, who seemed to be sitting on the fence. I’m not. I like this. I commend it to the House. GEORGIE DANSEY (Labour) (21:55): Tēnā koe, Mr Speaker. I’m glad that I got to take a call on this important bill, because—just to elaborate on the previous speaker, Tim Costley’s run through of what everyone talked about—I wanted to talk about my plumber. The reason I want to talk about my plumber is because my plumber is a very good example of how hard plumbers work in New Zealand. His name is Dave. I won’t tell you which company he works for, because I don’t want to embarrass him too much, but he came to my house to do some work in my bathroom. I walked into the hallway and found that the bathroom door was shut and that one of our chickens had escaped and was in the hallway of the house, and he was hiding behind the door because he was scared of birds, and I had to get rid of the chicken so he could come out. That’s the commitment—that is the commitment—that our plumbers have to ensuring they can do their job properly. Even though he was afraid, he was still there, brave, doing the plumbing work. Every year, I get an invite to the Waikato Master Plumbers Awards evening. Mike Wilson is a great Waikato plumber who hosts the event, and it’s a real honour to go and hear more about the incredible work our plumbers do. In particular, the Apprentice of the Year award is amazing. To see young plumbers coming through, doing the mahi, and getting recognised for that is really lovely. As previous speakers have spoken to, Labour supports this bill with reservations. One of the things that I appreciate about this bill is the fact that it’s going to, hopefully, make things more efficient for plumbers working in the sector. For those young apprentices who are coming into their career, it can make life a little bit easier for them as they flow through—excuse the pun! I commend this bill to the House. A party vote was called for on the question, That the Building and Construction Sector (Self-certification by Plumbers and Drainlayers) Amendment Bill be now read a third time. Ayes 101 New Zealand National 48; New Zealand Labour 34; ACT New Zealand 11; New Zealand First 8. Noes 21 Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand 15; Te Pāti Māori 4; Ferris; Kapa-Kingi. Motion agreed to. Bill read a third time. ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Teanau Tuiono): Members, the time has come for me to leave the Chair. Good night to everyone, especially Dave the plumber. The House stands adjourned until 2 p.m. tomorrow. The House adjourned at 9.59 p.m.