22 Jul 2015

Boom increases shoddy building risk

10:19 am on 22 July 2015

There is a risk of constructing more leaky buildings as the sector faces massive demand for houses, Auckland Council's head of building control says.

Inspectors are failing about one third third of buildings in the region and complaints to the Government about licenced builders are up 30 percent.

Council's general manager building control Ian McCormick told Nine to Noon that less experienced people are coming into the industry during the current boom and some supervisors are taking on more jobs than they can handle.

Mr McCormick said the leaky building crisis was a systemic failure, and they were not seeing that now, but were seeing the potential for more such buildings due to one-off failures.

He said in one recent case inspectors checking on a new single story foundation were forced to fail it five times, which put a lot of stress on everyone.

The Ministry of Building, Innovation and Employment's registrar of building practitioner licensing, Paul Hobbs, told the programme the crisis was a perfect storm of things converging.

He said legislation had since been changed, with the introduction of new consumer protections, a licensing regime and infringements.