Building Consent Authority

Waitakere City Council is now an Accredited Building Consent Authority

On 14 March 2008 Waitakere City Council was confirmed as an Accredited Building Consent Authority by certifying body International Accreditation New Zealand. This achievement has been made possible following a year of process change and significant improvement.

"Obtaining Building Consent Authority status is a terrific achievement. Staff have worked extremely hard to establish better practice in design, regulatory control and construction of buildings in Waitakere," says Planning and Regulatory Committee chairman, Vanessa Neeson.

"As every council in New Zealand knows, being a BCA brings with it the responsibility of maintaining standards as we continue to monitor, review and improve our performance. This project was achieved by the team while continuing business as usual," says Cr Neeson.

"The thorough work by the council last year to gear up for BCA status, has established even better systems of record-keeping and information-storage practices to give a clear audit trail of how we, as a BCA have dealt with consent applications, inspections and issue code compliance.

 "In terms of customer relationships we know that we are getting better when we hear the range of compliments from clients who are impressed with the higher standard of service from our very professional, hardworking staff.     "We will continue to refine our BCA practice through smarter use of electronic and business processes," says Mrs Neeson.

As a BCA, Waitakere City Council can deliver assurances regarding the robustness of the building consent process to ratepayers.   Waitakere’s consent process is presently 89% within the statutory timeframe of 20 days.

What is a Building Consent Authority (BCA)

A BCA is an accredited organisation which is can manage, monitor and process building consent applications. Accredited means it has been through a formal accreditation process with by International Accreditation New Zealand (IANZ) - the national authority for the accreditation of inspection services. .

The regulations

The regulations were developed by the Department of Building and Housing. They set out the standards and criteria that an applicant must meet to be accredited as a building consent authority.

There are 19 regulations, the most important being that a building consent authority must:

• have appropriate and documented policies, systems and procedures
• ensure it implements effectively its policies, systems and procedures.

The BCA must also record the decisions it makes, the reasons for them and the outcomes and actions of these decisions.

Regulations 5 – 16 require the BCA to have:

• accredited policies, procedures and systems for performing its building control functions
• accredited systems for:
   
  • ensuring it has an adequate number of employees and contractors to fulfill building control functions
  • establishing and assessing competencies to ensure work is allocated to competent employees or contractors
  • training employees
  • choosing and using contractors
  • identifying and employing technical leadership
  • ensuring it has the necessary technical resources and equipment
     
• accredited and adequate organisational records (including job descriptions and organisational charts).
• accredited and adequate systems for filing applications for building consents.

Regulation 17

Requires the BCA to have systems for assuring the quality of performance of its building control functions (to be in place by 1 December 2010).

Regulation 18

Requires the BCA to have systems for ensuring employees and contractors undertaking technical building control work have appropriate technical qualifications (to be in place by 1 December 2013).