Building and Construction Sector (Strengthening Occupational Licensing Regimes) Amendment Bill

I present a legislative statement on the Building and Construction Sector (Strengthening Occupational Licensing Regimes) Amendment Bill.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

Hon CHRIS PENK: Thank you, Madam Speaker. I move, That the Building and Construction Sector (Strengthening Occupational Licensing Regimes) Amendment Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Transport and Infrastructure Committee to consider the bill. At the appropriate time, I intend to move that the bill be reported to the House by 19 March 2026.

The Government is making changes with, I will say, with the help of others in this House—I’m pleased to say—to the building and construction control system that will place greater responsibility on building professionals. These changes mean that it is important that building professionals can be held appropriately to account in a timely manner. This bill will make a number of changes across three Acts to ensure the licensing regimes for licensed building practitioners, or LBPs—electrical workers, and plumbers, gasfitters, and drainlayers—are effective, efficient, robust, and sustainable.

The bill enables more efficient disciplinary processes, and here is how it does it. Currently, the Building Practitioners Board must hear every complaint brought before them, even if the complaint might be frivolous or vexatious. This means that complaint processes take longer and the board’s resources are used on matters that do not require their attention. The bill addresses this by further separating the board and registrar functions, allowing the registrar to assess and triage complaints. An investigator then will be appointed only if the registrar is satisfied that the complaint is not frivolous or vexatious. This will allow the board to focus their resources on complaints that require their attention and will reduce the time that it takes to resolve complaints.

The bill also removes restrictions on the ability for the registrar of the Plumbers, Gasfitters, and Drainlayers Board and the registrar for the Electrical Workers Registration Board from initiating complaints. This means that if the registrars of these regimes become aware of poor behaviour, they can proactively initiate an investigation, instead of allowing that behaviour to continue unchecked while waiting for a formal complaint to be made.

Madam Speaker, the bill will also make information easier to access—and I knew you were wondering about that. Currently, when a licensed building practitioner’s licence is cancelled for disciplinary reasons, or they become a member of Parliament—Mr Cameron Luxton—their name is removed from the public registrar.

Arena Williams: Is it?

Cameron Luxton: Mine’s still on the register, to be fair.

Hon CHRIS PENK: Mr Cameron Luxton’s name is still on at least one register; I think it’s probably the LBP one. This makes it more difficult for consumers to find out information about who has been disciplined and the reasons why. The bill will reverse this so that the practitioner’s name and the reasons they were disciplined will be displayed on the register for three years—kind of like being a member of Parliament; again, Madam Speaker, we’re very much on a register for three years, aren’t we?—and this will improve transparency and help consumers make more informed choices about which practitioner to engage. This is feeling more and more like “Democracy 101”, but anyway. The bill will help to ensure poor practitioner behaviour will be held to account—again, this is getting uncanny!

Unlike licensed building practitioners and many other professions, there are currently no codes of ethics for licensed plumbers, gasfitters, and drainlayers, or, for that matter, for licensed electrical workers. This means that they are not bound to standards of behaviour when representing their profession and the sector. This can make it difficult to hold them to account for poor behaviour where the behaviour is not directly related to the work that they have done. This bill aligns these professions with licensed building practitioners by including empowering provisions for codes of ethics to be made for these professions so that poor practitioner behaviour can be held to account by the respective boards. This will reinforce the expectations of professional conduct and competence and will incentivise practitioners to consistently deliver safe, compliant, and high-quality building work.

The bill will also reduce the administrative burden for licensed building practitioners, whom I shall just refer to now as LBPs. The Building Act requires LBPs to renew their licence every year. However, they need to complete skills maintenance only every two years. The bill will move the frequency that a licensed building practitioner must renew their licence from the Building Act into the Licensed Building Practitioner Rules. This will allow for greater flexibility to enable their renewal period to be aligned with skills maintenance in order to reduce the administrative burden for both the practitioner and the board.

The bill will also promote consistent complaints processes across licensing regimes, giving practitioners clearer obligations, and consumers a more predictable way to hold them to account. These changes will provide greater consistency for consumers when interacting with these professions and systems, not just for the behaviour they can expect from the professionals they hire but the processes and experiences they have when filing a complaint against a practitioner should something go wrong.

Finally, the bill will have a staged commencement. Most of the bill will commence on the day after the Royal assent of the bill. However, some changes to the LBP regime will commence through Order in Council. This is because they rely on changes to the LBP rules being passed by the Act. I commend this bill to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Labour supports this bill at this stage and I’m going to run through why that is, and also run through the questions that we will seek to explore at the select committee stage and with stakeholders, who are very engaged in this bill. It’s important to understand that many of the people working in the sector have been engaging with the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment and other Government agencies on these changes since 2021. A programme of work around the Building Systems Legislative Reform Programme, as it was known then, had five key pillars. They were about building products; occupational regulation—this issue—risk and liability; the building levy, and, particularly, what it pays for; and offences and penalties.

This bill acknowledges much of that work and seeks to implement some of that, but it’s part of a package of reforms, which means that it is important to make sure that each part has a sensible impact on the other parts. That is why we are going to make sure that those stakeholders who are most engaged in this—particularly the people working in the sector—are able to comply with the new requirements expected of them and that they are getting what they think they have signed up for in a building system which is more efficient because of these measures.

I want to draw members’ attention to the legislative statement because there are some big claims being made for these stakeholders, particularly the claim that the bill ensures that consumers can hold tradespeople to account if things go wrong. That is critically important in our building system, and it is not something that many consumers—particularly mums and dads who are building homes and trying to do that affordably and efficiently—can do at the moment. It is critically important that we improve that for people, and, as electorate MPs, I’m sure many of us have been approached by constituents when things have gone wrong or when they haven’t been able to access the complaints processes or the insurances that they thought they had bought and paid for. It’s important that we ensure that those consumers are getting a fair go in this, and this kind of improvement to the occupational licensing regime is critical to doing that.

To draw members’ attention, as well, to where this fits in with that bigger programme of work, the difference from what was consulted on in 2021 is relevant here. The strengthening occupational regulation regime at that time was about supporting licensed building practitioners to do things faster and quicker. Some of these changes here come from that initiative, and those are a good thing and we support those. The supervision endorsements are something that we will be asking questions around about why those aren’t being progressed in this, because those are important, particularly around some of those higher-risk trades, like, say, internal waterproofing, that were initially included in that programme of work. Instead, we’re seeing a focus here from the Government on a self-certification regime at the lower end of risk whereas you could also very helpfully for consumers advance their interests by improving the situation for higher-risk works, which doesn’t appear to be the focus here.

The industry was consulted on ensuring that non-licensed people aren’t carrying out the higher-risk work unsupervised. That’s important, and there’s an important sort of complaints aspect to that, as well. It’s important that we’re capturing that kind of work for consumers and that consumers understand how to raise issues around that. The penalties are high, but that relies on having proper auditing and proper accounting for the work going on. If we don’t have well-resourced councils and well-resourced regulators, then we can’t say to consumers that that is going to be a part of what the Government says on the tin, which is that they will ensure that consumers can hold tradespeople to account if things go wrong.

The third thing here is around improving consumers’ access to products that spread their risk. Either that’s insurance or it’s something that they pay for in their rates because their council is looking over it, or it’s something that they pay for with their tax dollars because they have a regulator that is tooled up to be able to do this work. It is not fair if consumers are asked to bear extra costs associated with these changes. It is certainly not the intention of the Labour Party to support something like that, and we will be asking questions around that.

In the last 40 seconds, I want to draw the House’s attention to the Attorney-General’s vet of this bill. It’s important to me as well that we make sure that the new investigative processes and information-gathering powers are fair and that the new ability to enter into properties to be investigating is something that is well understood within the industry and it doesn’t penalise the smaller players at the expense of the big ones. We want to make sure that in New Zealand’s building industry, where we back our builders, back our one-man bands, and back our people out there who are doing the job, they aren’t unfairly disadvantaged at the expense of the larger players because of some of these new provisions.

Tēnā koe, Madam Speaker. This morning, I was on a moderating panel at the International Conference on Urban Health. I don’t know if any of the Government members are going to be attending any part of that, but it’s being held for three days at the Tākina Centre, here in Wellington, and there are experts from all over the world. Some of the other speakers on the panel with me are absolute experts in the built environment, and two particularly specialised in housing, and they were all making the same point, which is that with all the research they do—and these are academics who do research in the real world. They work with local government, central government, and the private sector, and they look at the outcomes from different things. They’re saying that one of the key determinants of health and a whole bunch of other things is housing and our buildings.

For most people, 90 percent of our time these days is spent indoors, and the quality of the ventilation of the building has a direct impact on people’s health. It’s no mystery to New Zealanders that we have a problem with childhood asthma and we have a problem with cold, mouldy, damp, expensive-to-heat homes. This puts strain on our health system and this affects productivity, and there are all these ways in which improving our building sector can help the entire country, which is why we should be doing that.

This bill is the first of two bills—obviously, the second bill will be debated directly after this—and this bill the Green Party can support because it’s aiming to ensure that licensed professionals in the building and construction sector can be appropriately held to account through complaints and disciplinary processes that are effective. It’s strengthening the occupational licensing regime, and I think that’s a good thing. It’s far from everything that’s needed to improve our building sector, and I am a little bit concerned that right now, when everyone has such a focus on bringing down the cost of building, we’re not focusing on also lifting the performance of our buildings, because those buildings last for decades. People spend a lot of time in them, and if they’re not built well, they will cost us more in the long run, both in direct costs in terms of heating or cooling but also in costs to society in terms of emergency admissions and long-term chronic health problems which mean that people can’t work.

It just makes so much sense for New Zealand to improve its building sector, and we have to look at whole-of-life costs. The answer is not getting rid of all regulation; in fact, it’s quite the opposite: it’s having smarter, better regulations that are well enforced, and we need to properly resource the people who are doing the vetting, doing the training, and doing inspections. One of the things that was brought up on the panel—and this was from an American context—was how it’s not enough to regulate the quality of the build; we need to have ongoing performance requirements around buildings as they’re being used—for example, a warrant of fitness for rental properties, which is something that I know my colleague Chlöe Swarbrick is very passionate about and has proposed members’ bills on.

We can have a system that ensures that after the building is built, we’re checking and making sure that it has a healthy indoor air temperature, that it doesn’t cost a fortune to achieve that, and that it’s not damp and mouldy. We can make sure that there aren’t unhealthy products being used in those buildings, because we are going to find out that there are a bunch of products that are really, really problematic.

Hon Member: Wool.

Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: Microplastics—oh yes, wool. Wool, yes, and the Green Party absolutely supports wool and we support cross-laminated timber. We support using natural, sustainable products that are produced here in New Zealand, and we can do that—we absolutely can do that. That’s an area where we could find cross-party support, potentially.

This bill, in and of itself, I think is a good step. The next bill we don’t feel so confident about because it is expanding the ability of builders and plumbers and others to self-certify their work, and I think—

CHAIRPERSON (Maureen Pugh): We’ll just deal with this bill at the moment.

Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: Yes. I think better regulations that actually measure the performance of the buildings and the things that we need to know are something where if we have that data, it should be possible to do. The Green Party would love to work with the Government on that because it will actually help improve productivity and health in our country.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Look, I rise as one of those LBPs—those licensed building practitioners—who are out there doing the hard mahi on sites around the country, building these houses. The thing that is driving us mental in the construction industry is the untenable delays that we face in waiting for inspections and waiting for things that building professionals—because the people who build our houses in New Zealand are professionals—know how to do. If we are going to be trusting our building professionals, they need to be held to a high account of themselves and of their industry, and that’s what this bill does.

The code of ethics that already exists, I’ve had my quibbles with. It’s got great things in there like saying to take responsibility for your actions and explain risk to the client. However, I’m not sure about whether a code of ethics can really figure out whether you’ve priced work fairly, whether you’ve acknowledged and respected cultural norms, and other such unmeasurables. If it’s going to be subjective, then it shouldn’t be in a code of ethics.

The building professionals in our country want to be held to a higher standard, they want their industry held to a higher standard, and they want the respect that comes with the hard work and diligence that has been acquired over years of gaining a skill, and if someone is taking the mickey, the registrar needs to be able to deal with that. People who are impersonating LBPs need to be held to account. Something that I have seen in the industry is people using LBP numbers. That’s got to stop. LBPs have to be held to a high standard, and that’s what this bill will do. I commend it to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Look, I want us to consider what it is that we want out of our building system. The first one of those things is we want quality outcomes. That, actually, is the most important thing of all—that we have warm, dry homes that are also durable—and that’s one of the challenges we have.

Hon Mark Patterson: Wool. Wool, Andy—wool.

ANDY FOSTER: Oh, my colleague the Hon Mark Patterson is talking about wool, and he’s absolutely right that it’s a very fine product to use in these buildings. We want quality outcomes that people can rely on because, of course, for most people, the home is the most important investment and the biggest investment they will ever make, and they need to have some surety that what they buy is going to be a quality product.

The second thing is that we also want to have a quick, efficient, reliable system that gets the consenting processes done in a reasonable way, and, of course, it’s always good to speak on building issues after our resident builder—Cameron Luxton—because what you hear time and time again is that the consenting process as it is at the moment is really frustrating people. If you’ve got to wait for two or three or four days, or however many days it might be, to get an inspection at different stages of a building, that costs real money. It’s not just the cost of the consenting but it’s the cost of the delay.

This is all about streamlining delivery processes. We should be able to expect, as we do everywhere else in life, that what is provided by a person who provides you with a service—to look at it in terms of consumer guarantees—is fit for purpose, and that’s really what this is about. It’s saying that when we have somebody who is a licensed plumber, gasfitter, drain layer, or electrician, they know what they’re doing, they’re suitably qualified, and they deliver the product that they are supposed to deliver, and I’m sure the vast majority do exactly that.

What this also does is it says that if there is something wrong with something that somebody does, instead of going to the council, in this particular situation—and, of course, for councils, it’s a bit of a nightmare anyway. When I was on the Wellington City Council, we were on the verge of handing back our warrant, or at least that’s what I wanted us to do because it was just a liability. It’s much better that the liabilities and the responsibilities lie with the people who are actually delivering the product and that they’re doing it well. This bill streamlines the disciplinary procedures and gives more powers to the board that governs those things, and if you’ve got your name there and you’re registered, that means a lot more than if you’ve been deregistered.

The other thing we need to make sure of as we go through this process is that we don’t have these phoenix arrangements allowing people to get around them. In other words, it is you individually—not you, Madam Speaker, but it is the individual who is performing the service who is responsible, and not their 2016 version or their 2017 version or their 2018 version. It is that person, and that person alone, who is responsible for that and who is held accountable for that.

Just to finish up, what we want is a really good process for holding practitioners to account for delivering a quality product and to hold them to account when something goes wrong. I am very much looking forward to considering this in front of the select committee. I commend the bill to the House.

This is one of two bills that we’re discussing in the name of Minister Chris Penk, and I just want to begin by acknowledging him and the work that he’s doing to make our building and construction sector highly productive so that it produces high quality when building homes right across this country. This bill, as the previous speaker, Andy Foster, alluded to, is all about efficient processes for those in the sector. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise to take a call on the Building and Construction Sector (Strengthening Occupational Licensing Regimes) Amendment Bill. Now, we know that New Zealand needs more warm, dry, and safe homes, and I don’t think there would be anyone in the House who would disagree with that statement. How do we go about it? We all have different approaches.

This is an interesting bill, and Labour is supporting the bill, but, first and foremost, I think we need to keep front of mind the need to protect consumers—those people who we are building these houses for. We know that we need stronger, clearer licensing systems that can improve efficiency across the building sector, and that will give strength and consumer confidence, the kind of consumer confidence that we know we need.

Now, we’ve always talked in the Labour Party about New Zealanders deserving—as I said at the top of my contribution—affordable, warm, dry homes that are built to last. These need to be good quality homes. They need to be well built, and having stronger licensing will help to lift that quality, but we also have to make sure that it’s fair, that it’s proportionate, and that it genuinely improves the safety of those homes. This bill does aim to introduce broader investigative and disciplinary tools, and so we need to make sure that those are transparent, that they’re balanced, and that they’re not punitive for smaller operators. Again, that’s a role that the select committee needs to pay particular attention to, particularly through the lens of how this bill can be improved to ensure stronger protections for the consumers and, ultimately, for the people who are going to live in those homes.

Now, the other thing that this bill sets out to do—and it’s great to have heard in contributions this afternoon from a member across the way who has been a licensed building practitioner: Cameron Luxton from the ACT Party. The bill needs to support competent tradespeople, and absolutely that’s a focus that the select committee needs to give in progressing this bill: how can it support competent tradespeople?

One of the specific considerations that I think should be given ample time to and on which submissions should be sought is how best we can integrate some of the new technology and technological innovations that can make that process for tradespeople so much better and can speed up what have been some of the traditional administrative and bureaucratic hurdles—speed bumps, if you will—that often interrupt what should be and would be a much more efficient, much more affordable process if there was less administrative load, less burden, and less waiting time for builders and licensed building practitioners and tradespeople during the construction of new homes. Making sure that those technological advancements are investigated fully and prioritised through the development of this bill would ensure that some of the many frustrations that our very talented and very clever workforce face as they go about building the homes that we know New Zealand needs could be eliminated through the use of this new technology.

Now, the other thing that we need to ensure in progressing this bill and which we do support is that we don’t shift the risk down the chain. When we look at protecting and supporting competent tradespeople, we also need to make sure that we’re not doing that at the expense of short-changing, ultimately, the people who end up owning or living in these homes. Again, another focus for the select committee would be to make it a very clear priority to ensure that we don’t simply shift the risk on to, ultimately, the occupier of the home.

The bill has three aims, with the first being to protect consumers, the second being to support competent tradespeople, and the third being strong consideration not to shift the risk down the chain but to instead lift the quality of the homes, which need to be warm, dry, and safe for all New Zealanders. Thank you.

Licensed building professionals in the building and construction sector are doing a fantastic job to ensure the quality of our homes, and this bill strengthens the system that supports their work. This bill will make it easier and more affordable to deliver the new homes that New Zealanders need, while putting stronger checks in place to guard against shoddy work. It lifts accountability across the sector and gives customers a clear, reliable path forward if things go wrong. This is about having safer homes, higher standards, and greater confidence for everyone. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. This is the second bill in a row that’s going to the Transport and Infrastructure Committee, so we shouldn’t have been so complimentary about what a collegial committee it is, because it seems to have no end.

Labour will be supporting this bill, and, as almost everybody has said already, I think that all New Zealanders can take pride in the fact that we have a workforce of tradespeople and professionals who pride themselves on building well and providing quality products. But we can’t take that for granted, and we do need to provide frameworks and make sure that in this House we give them the tools that they need to ensure that the final product—not just for the consumer but for the industry as a whole—is kept safe and is kept efficient and actually amounts to the types of homes that we value and that we want people living in.

We’ll support this bill because clearer licensing systems, we believe, can improve efficiencies across the building sector and can certainly strengthen consumer confidence, which is incredibly, incredibly important. For many people in this House, you wouldn’t have to go back too many years to remember examples when that has gone wrong and there have been large-scale disasters in this sector, and so we need to make sure that we’re on our toes. Electrical workers, plumbers, gasfitters, and drainlayers just by definition operate in high-risk environments, and so having clear, competent standards and clear, consistent enforcement regimes, and modernised complaint systems, are, I think, essential, and that doesn’t feel like too much to ask for.

As my colleague Reuben Davidson has just said, on this side of the House, and certainly within the Labour Party, we’ve always had at our core a fundamental belief that New Zealanders fundamentally deserve homes that are warm, dry, and safe to live in, and therefore stronger licensing that can help lift that quality and do anything towards making that achievable is worthwhile, but only if it’s fair, if it’s proportionate, and if it genuinely improves safety.

The bill introduces broad investigative and disciplinary tools, and, as well as those tools being fair and transparent and with the normal caveats that we put around those things, it is important that they’re not overly or particularly punitive, particularly for small operators. I’m sure that the select committee will ask those appropriate questions and will play a critical role in testing whether the powers that are inherent in this piece of potential legislation actually do protect the public without creating a whole host of unnecessary burdens.

The new levies and compliance costs: as has been said, we do have to be vigilant that it doesn’t just end up being someone else’s problem. I think that the Government, to date, hasn’t really provided sufficient information or sufficient analysis on that affordability and whether there’s potential for those flow-on effects, and so I will also be interested in hearing more about that at select committee.

Ultimately, stronger licensing works only when regulators and the people tasked with keeping on top of how that’s working are actually resourced properly to do that job. They need to be able to act on those complaints and they need to be able to not just do things retrospectively after something has gone wrong but also be really active in supporting the people who work in this sector to make sure that they’re able to comply and monitor those competencies. Again, we will be keeping a close eye on making sure that the requisite information that makes that material and useful comes through the select committee process and affords us a little bit more confidence. It does need to be a robust select committee process, with—

Tangi Utikere: Not four months and one day.

Dr TRACEY McLELLAN: —not four months and one day, as my colleague Tangi Utikere is noting, which has been a common thread going through this House at the moment. It kind of makes a little bit of a mockery of the select committee process if a select committee doesn’t have sufficient time or if there’s some sort of pressure from a Minister to report back on a particular day, and we’ll hear later on in the rest of today’s session, I’m sure, some examples of how that’s happened.

We wouldn’t want that to happen to this bill. We’re up for a decent, robust process that is in itself clear and transparent so that we can assess that this bill provides the clarity and the transparency required.

Our Government is committed to building infrastructure and building homes fast, efficiently, and well. We back our builders and we want to see a high standard of building, and this bill increases both accountability and quality, which is what we want to see. We want to build warm, affordable, dry homes, and, wow, have we got a pipeline of homes in Hawke’s Bay. I would just like to acknowledge our amazing building Minister, who visited Hawke’s Bay recently and who is in charge of these reforms, which are going to achieve a higher standard in building but also get fast, efficient homes built. I commend this bill to the House.

Motion agreed to.

Bill read a first time.

The question is, That the Building and Construction Sector (Strengthening Occupational Licensing Regimes) Amendment Bill be considered by the Transport and Infrastructure Committee.

Motion agreed to.

Bill referred to the Transport and Infrastructure Committee.

Instruction to the Transport and Infrastructure Committee