Moving to meet Demand for Building Inspections

Date:

Apr 19, 2016

Queenstown Lakes District Council is beefing up its building processing and inspection regime to meet ballooning demand from builders and developers.

The Council will soon be offering  inspections on Saturday mornings in Queenstown as well as an extra  building inspector on the road to minimise the time between when inspections are booked and completed.

Currently it was taking an average of five days for an inspector to be available for a routine inspection,  Building Services Manager Stewart Geddes  said. The Council aimed to reduce that back to one working day as soon as possible.

At the same time, QLDC is warning that it will not always be able to meet the required 20-working-day turnaround to process applications for building consents, due to increasing demand and a shortage of staff.

Mr Geddes said the number of applications for building consents was up by 30 percent this year already, on top of year-on-year increases.

QLDC’s average processing time is currently 19 days but Mr Geddes said it was inevitable that the 20-day requirement would not be met in many cases.

QLDC has approached other Councils for assistance however due to a nationwide building boom and a  sector-wide shortage of staff qualified to process building consents  minimal assistance has come forward.

This is reinforced in our Southern area with  Dunedin City Council  also recently acknowledging difficulties meeting the statutory deadlines.

“We are hiring more external building contractors to process consents and actively trying to recruit more staff, but this is a sector-wide problem that is not easy to address,” Mr Geddes said.