Local Government (Customer Focus) Amendment Bill

I move, That the Local Government (Customer Focus) Amendment Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Governance and Administration Committee to consider the bill.

The Local Government (Customer Focus) Amendment Bill comes as a result of some work I undertook for the then Minister of Local Government, Paula Bennett, commencing in 2014, and the brief to myself was very clear. She wished me to focus and consult widely on the incidence of what she called “loopy” rules, and I think that’s a very apt description of a number of the rules that beset local government and literally get in the way of local government providing top quality service to those people it serves in its regulatory functions and other functions that it undertakes.

I assembled a panel of people from throughout New Zealand from a range of skills and experiences, including the private sector, property development, chamber of commerce, local government mayors, and a few other experts. We literally consulted in most parts of New Zealand, from Northland down to Southland. We went to Invercargill; we went to the West Coast. We took our time. We not only listened to local government on their views around the rules and the constraints under which they operate; we also heard from the general public. A number of property developers and those who wish to make a contribution to their communities by way of development, building property, building subdivisions for housing, building commercial properties had a very singular and strong message to us at that time. That was that their reflection was that not only was the Building Act and not only were the Resource Management Act (RMA) and a number of other Acts providing sometimes troublesome impediments to them getting on and doing what they wished to do by way of application—the focus wasn’t on that, and that is not the focus of this bill either.

The focus that came through to us very strongly, apart from those reflections around legislation such as the Building Act and the RMA, was on customer service. I will go into that, obviously, a little further, but just one reflection I will make on the RMA: I want to congratulate the Labour Government and the local government Minister Nanaia Mahuta for their focus on ensuring that local government itself is given the tools to improve its performance across all its regulatory functions. I believe, and I do hope, that this customer service - focused bill finds favour across the House as a simple measure to concentrate the attention of those in local government at performing their regulatory functions properly, so that we can truly provide good service to those who approach local government for their regulatory functions.

The customer focus doesn’t mean providing a welcome mat in the front office of a council. What it means, and what my intent is with this bill, is, just as the Public Service are now required to do, local government receive and process applications to them for whatever function, most particularly in terms of resource consents and in the Building Act but not exclusively, and that a system is worked out within local government—and far be it from me, and far be it from this Parliament, in my view, to prescribe what that should look like, because I respect the autonomy of local government. But what I would like to see through this bill is the chief executive of the local authority to turn their attention to “How do we respond to this—very simple, in this case—resource consent or building consent application? What is the best, most timely, most cost-effective way that we can process and see the passage of this application through our council, and to provide a decision? It may not be what the applicant hopes for or wants and may have conditions, but how do we provide an answer for the applicant so that the property developer who wishes to build social housing, for example, has certainty and has a decision which is cost-effective and timely coming through that local authority?”

By way of, perhaps, example, throughout the work of the Rules Reduction Taskforce, we had many, many meetings with property developers. They are the ones who wish to build houses. They’re the ones who wish to build warm, dry homes, whether it’s social housing right through the range. One developer said to me—and we were in the southern part of New Zealand—“Tell me which council you believe we get better service from when we are fronting up to the front desk with an application for a subdivision, say.” This developer gave us two examples. One was in a very busy, very fast-growing local authority area, and the other was in a slightly bigger, more urban but more stable area without that much growth. So I went, “Of course one is going to get better service from a fast-growing local authority who’s geared up for that.”, and the answer was, “No. Actually, we got excellent service from that local authority which was just in steady mode, and the reason we got that good service from them and timely, cost-effective decisions was because they literally rolled out the red carpet, because they welcomed us into town.” Any developer who wished to build homes was welcome in that town, and they got what the developers regarded was good service from local authority. That’s what I’m hoping to achieve through this bill.

I did say towards the beginning of this reading that it wasn’t just about customer focused—no, it’s not. It’s about good process and good service, but, actually, customer service goes an awfully long way. If I think about one council I have visited a couple of times over there—and that would be Rotorua—it strikes me: you walk into the building and it is warm and friendly and welcoming, but most of all it’s got bicycles, and the bicycles are there for council staff to jump on instead of using the council fleet of cars, and I thought that is good innovation and that is good thinking on behalf of councils. Councils are innovative. Councils do care, mayors do care, planners care about the applications that come across their desk. But what I would like to see here is a focus on who they should be focusing on, and that is the people they serve, the people who come into the council with an application. It might be a licence, it might be a hairdressing licence, or it might be liquor licensing. I’ve mentioned a number of applications it might be.

So just finally, just so I can put it on the record, the main provision of this bill is that section 14 of the Local Government Act is amended, which is around the principles relating to local authorities, and it inserts “[promoting] a customer focus and delivery of public services and regulatory functions”. If this small, simple—very simple—bill can move councils along just a little bit, together with all the other initiatives that the current Government and previous Governments and future Governments will be bringing in to support local councils and their very important economic development functions—and I have talked about housing. I do believe the provision of housing and the provision of economic activity is critical now in this post-COVID world. Well, if we can get this through, then I do hope it finds the favour of the House. Thank you.

I rise to take a call on the Local Government (Customer Focus) Amendment Bill and say that we will not be supporting it. It’s a seemingly small and innocuous amendment, but it’s the kind of bill where it proposes a solution and we’re trying to figure out the problem, because the problem that the member’s proposing actually relates to the Resource Management Act.

So we will not be supporting it, but let me go through in detail around why, because the member Jacqui Dean has said that part of the proposition is to ensure that there is a greater emphasis of councils on the customer. It demonstrates that either the member has failed to recognise the range of customers on a daily basis that local governments and councils deal with, or she’s talking about a specific type of customer. In the example that she’s given, by and large, building consents are a certain type of decision making where if that was the intent, then she should have had the definition in that bill.

But let me come back to the range of customers, because that does make a very big difference. I mean, we inserted the “four well-beings” back into the law, which was supported by councils, because councils realised that they needed to engage quite widely on a number of fronts with their communities, and that was going to be a hallmark of their ability to deliver services that would actually meet the aspirations of a community on a number of fronts: recreational facilities, cycleways, waste services, the way in which you set fees and levies. So councils already engage with their communities and they consult widely on a number of things. They have the annual plans and long-term community plans.

They consult on things like bylaws. And if we go to the range of bylaws that they consult on—in roading, speed limits, parking, traffic; alcohol ban bylaws; trade waste; freedom camping; and dog control, to name a few. And if you go on to any council website, they will detail the range of things that they are consulting on to secure community feedback—those most affected, perhaps, in some instances—so that they can then use that feedback to tailor the decisions that they make. That’s a really important element of the services that councils provide, because if we truly believe in local people making local decisions, then we have to be able to ensure that they are able to engage with their community and take on board really strong views and really local things in order to moderate the decisions that they’re making that are impacting those most directly affected. So I wonder whether the bill is somewhat misplaced and the member, having focused a large part of her contribution on building consents, may have actually wanted to target another set of provisions or expand out so, more precisely, her intent could be reflected in the bill that she was going to bring to this House.

When I think about a number of councils that I’ve visited and the New Zealand Society of Local Government Managers awards that highlight the level of community engagement and customer focus that councils have to engage in—because they are measured every day in every moment on a number of fronts, because where the rubber hits the road is on the range of services that they’re providing—when I look to the member’s own council, I was quite interested around the range of engagements that they had on things like the Kakanui mowing survey. They surveyed the community. The community didn’t want a change of service, but the council took on board that—they didn’t change the service, although they undertook a new contract. That very much was reflected back by the local community to ensure that the mowing of that particular area was going to stay the same, even though the person delivering the service was going to be different.

When I look at the consultation in, again, the member’s own area, Ōtematatā master plan—where that was engaging with the community to set out their vision on how and where the township will grow, there was a lot of feedback on that particular issue, and the council was able to glean from that feedback a better response to the decisions around the master plan and planning. Then there are things like where the Moeraki toilet was going to be placed, and the community expressed a strong view in favour of the council, and so the toilet went up and the project proceeded.

My point here is that every day the council has to engage with the community on a number of things. Yes, for significant things—again, the annual plan and the long-term plan actually capture a lot of the significant aspects, but then there are smaller aspects, very local, that can get communities very charged up, and it would be remiss of any council not to take on board the views of those most directly affected so that they can better make decisions. If that’s not customer focus, I’m not sure what is.

Some of the contentious areas, however—and let me come back to things like planning fees and charges. These are often consulted on because a dollar here, a couple of dollars there increase can make all the world of difference; but, again, you can go through many council websites and they will demonstrate how they are consulting on planning fees and charges across a number of services that councils provide, and then take on board the feedback about where there is the most concern or impact on those most directly affected, and then councils are able to propose the types of changes that take account of those types of things. That is as we would want it—surely, surely.

I acknowledge what seems to be the genuine desire to ensure that there should be a customer focus across councils, but I assert that there are already mechanisms within councils that take account of this. We have to ensure by and large that, on a regular basis, as a matter of best practice and good protocol, councils develop the tools where they are regularly engaging with communities, not driven hard by statute, but, actually, this is about responsible, good governance, good local decision-making, and enabling the community to feed into a process.

I was really, really encouraged by the range of things in my own area that have been consulted on—everything from gully restoration to recreational facilities, playgrounds, Hamilton being a family-friendly area, upgrading all the playgrounds, being ensured that we’re a cycle-friendly town—the extension of the cycleway has been really useful in promoting all sorts of activities and our recreation facilities. Those are things that communities and families feel really strongly about—even where you can take your pet for a walk without being hassled by anyone else. So there are already mechanisms in place for councils to garner the feedback of their communities—those most directly affected—so that they can tailor their decision making to ensure that their focus is on their local communities: those most directly affected.

Let me come back to the issue of building consents, because, again, if you go to council websites, you’ll find that councils oblige themselves by identifying the process that they undertake to work through building consents and the timing you can expect, but also if there are off-ramps because of whatever reason, what might cause a delay and the clock gets stopped. You can go through the 67 territorial authorities and see that level of visibility. Now, I’m not saying that that in itself is an absolute assurance, but that is there to give people, users, greater oversight as to the processes, the timings, that they can expect from a certain council.

Lastly, can I say as a result of the COVID experience and timely payments to small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs), Minister Nash and the Minister of Finance and I sent a letter to councils just to say that people are going through difficult times; it would be really good if SMEs could be paid on time by councils. Councils respond really positively. They don’t need a stick. In fact, many councils pride themselves on best practice in the way that they engage with people, because their focus is about delivering better services to all communities in their area, and there’s no need for the bill, really.

I rise to speak to support the Local Government (Customer Focus) Amendment Bill. Just now, the Hon Nanaia Mahuta talked about public consultation and said that it may be part of the customer focus, but it cannot replace customer focus. They’re somewhat different.

Customer focus is something that companies, organisations, and Government agencies frequently talk about. If we visit home pages of companies, we’ll see customer focus for these things. We all agree it is important and it is a culture that we should have in dealing with customers, so there is no dispute in that sense. However, it is often easier said than done because when you implement this customer-focused culture, you’ll find that it is not so easy. Now, we all experience this kind of customer-focused culture in different ways. There are various experiences, I would say. Because of the modern technology, we now have maybe a modern understanding of the customer-focused approach. We have a different standard in terms of the customer-focused culture.

Now, local government plays a very important role in our daily lives. We all have some sort of dealings with local authorities, but developers—as the sponsor of the bill, the Hon Jacqui Dean, mentioned in her speech—are often frustrated when dealing with local authorities. I have talked to many developers, and they do express their frustration from time to time, for example, in terms of resource consent or in terms of inspection. Very often, an inspector will come to inspect one particular part of a project, and then there will be a change in specifications and then a change of standard, so there are at least three variations or change of requirements. It has financial implications for these developers, so how do you deal with these sorts of issues?

It is important for councils and for local authorities to understand the frustration and also understand the financial implication and also economic implications, and for that reason I think this bill can help promote a customer-focused culture in local authorities. It gives customer focus some kind of legal status to make sure the local authorities will indeed have this kind of customer-focused approach in delivering public services and also regulatory functions. At the moment, there is no requirement under the Local Government Act 2002 for local authorities to do so, so it is important to have this kind of bill to make sure the local authorities do understand that it is their responsibility to promote a customer-focused culture in their agencies.

So, for that reason, I think this bill has its importance and, for that reason, we should support the bill, and it is also feasible to do so because we do have what we call the State services framework, which actually promotes the customer-focused approach. So if we applied that to this particular bill to make sure that local authorities understand and, really, do something, it can be done.

So, very specifically, as the sponsor of the bill, the Hon Jacqui Dean mentioned, actually, we could have a case manager to follow this particular project, as we often do. In a bank, you have a case manager, and then you follow this so that you don’t have to deal with different kinds of people at different times. If people do not understand your case, you have to repeat what you have said before, and in the end, no progress. So it’s a waste of time. A waste of time means a waste of money and financial cost, and this is particularly important, of course, for small businesses in this particular time of post - COVID-19 recovery.

I do believe this is a useful bill. This is an important bill. I support the bill. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I appreciate the opportunity to take a call on this bill. I’d like to acknowledge Jacqui Dean for her good fortune in having it drawn from the ballot. I’d like to begin by just sort of outlining, unfortunately, some of the challenges that we have on this side with the bill. Now, I’m sure no one in this House would argue that having good customer service is important from a local authority, you know, from a business, from Parliament, from members of Parliament. But one of the issues with this bill is it’s fairly ambiguous. I mean, what does customer service mean? Who is the customer?

So let’s look, for example, at the Dog Control Act. Who is the customer in terms of council staff interpreting that Act? Is it the dog owner? Is it the dog? Is it the cat? Is it the neighbour? Is it members of the public? Now, I don’t mean to sound facetious here, but I do mean to raise the point that the bill is rather ambiguous. It is rather subjective, because, as the previous speaker mentioned in his speech, people can have an experience, in this case with a council—people can have what seems to be the same experience but interpret that in different ways.

So this idea of what is customer service, what is good customer service—now, I used to work in retail. If I could put a little bit of a context on that, I spent five years working in a music store while I was studying, and some of the aspects we were taught about good customer service—and I’d like to make the point that I believe councils already do have good customer service. But let me just make this point. So the first one is focusing on customers’ needs. This is fairly sort of well known, particularly around the business community: the customer comes first. So you develop products and services for the customer’s needs. Now, I would argue that councils already do this. We heard from the Hon Nanaia Mahuta that this bill is a solution looking for a problem. So is there really a problem around customers’ needs? The council have various mechanisms, short-term plans, long-term plans, to look at the customers’ needs across the city. There’s opportunities within those mechanisms for those customers—in this effect, those people who live in the city, who pay rates—to engage. So it’s already there.

What about the second one—customer preferences, viewing customers as individuals with different preferences? I would argue that councils already do that. The councils engage in a range of areas. You know, they engage on social media, targeted to certain groups, already. Most councils have ethnic groups, ethnic advisers who reach out to various groups to provide customer service. So I would argue that they already do that.

What about another one that we learnt in the business sector, the voice of the customer? So is the voice of the customer heard already through the way councils generally operate? I would argue yes, and it happens every three years when there’s a local body election. So at that time, those customers have the opportunity to vote for people to represent them, which moves on to point number four, customer advocates.

The customer advocates are the councils who are elected when the customers have their voice. So, look, if someone, let’s say in the city of Hamilton, has an issue with the Hamilton City Council around customer service, they need to go to their councillor and the councillor will then advocate for them to the council. I don’t think this is the place for—I don’t think there’s any necessity for us to pass legislation around this when we already have those systems in place. I’m a little bit confused around this bill, but that’s OK.

I would like to pick up on the building point, because the Hon Nanaia Mahuta mentioned that sometimes there are views expressed to MPs around the timeliness of building consents, around building, and I’d also like to raise the same question to the member Jacqui Dean. So why does she not just focus on building consents? Maybe in her right of reply at the end of this speech, she might want to talk about that. So my time has run out. Thank you for the opportunity to contribute.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise to speak on behalf of New Zealand First and to signal right at the outset that we feel very sorry for Nuk Korako. I mean, Nuk Korako came to the House with a serious bill, and it got labelled as probably one of the most ineffective and useless and unnecessary members’ bills to ever hit the floor, and that title’s just been taken away from him by the Hon Jacqui Dean, with her Local Government (Customer Focus) Amendment Bill—his was, of course, the infamous lost-luggage bill. So congratulations, the Hon Jacqui Dean, you’ve just taken the title off Nuk Korako, and that’s hence why New Zealand First sees no need to support this bill. Look, I do apologise to the honourable member; I know she sweated hours and hours and months of research to come up with these two clauses to amend the Local Government Act to make local government do what my council did when I was the mayor, as a matter of course—talk to people.

In fact, I thought I could do a quick straw poll of mayors throughout the country, and flicked out a text and said “Do we need this bill?” Well, it’s interesting. Now, I know they’re all busy people and I really should not have interrupted their days, but the response that’s come back from various mayors around the country is simply, “No, we do this as a matter of course; this is what we do.”

I do find it rather curious that the party had trumpeted the need to cut red tape, slash bureaucracy, do away with stupid rules, the Paula Bennett—

💬 Mark Patterson: Bonfire regulations.

Bonfire regulations. Paula Bennett was going to burn down the world with piles and piles of regulations that were pointless, meaningless, had no need, and were simply tying up hours and hours of Public Service time.

But, look, it’s really simple, and I have no real depth of knowledge—

💬 SPEAKER: Order! Order! The time is coming for me to leave the Chair. This bill is set down for further consideration next sitting day.

Debate interrupted.

The House adjourned at 1 p.m. (Wednesday)