For immediate release

Duncan Webb

Media Release 16 March 2017

Select Committee Says No Defective Repair Inquiry Warranted

The Finance and Expenditure Select Committee has rejected the Petition of activist and Christchurch Central Labour Candidate Duncan Webb and 3054 others seeking an inquiry into defective EQC repairs on the basis that the majority of the Committee “do not think that the scale of the problem warrants an inquiry”.

EQC has asserted that “the number of repairs under the Canterbury Home Repair Programme (CHRP) that were found to need remediation is in line with, or better than, rates for new builds in the wider building sector”.

There are over 12,000 complaints in respect of the quality of repairs.

The petitioner, Duncan Webb says that EQC’s position is laughable. An MBIE audit of 101 homes showed more than half of the homes audited having defective repairs and one in three have having structural repair work which was non-compliant with the Building Code. EQC is constantly revising upwards its own estimates homeowner complaints and the likely size of the problem.

A number of insurers are concerned that many of the homes that were poorly repaired will finally be assessed as over the EQC cap and therefore increase the insurer’s liability. Sources have indicated that a Southern Response internal reviews indicate that around 60% of the defectively repaired homes will end up being over cap.

“The government is ignoring a growing problem – every time this is looked at the issue gets larger” Webb says. “It’s time to recognise that there has been a very serious problem with the EQC repair programme. It has been mismanaged from woe to go and now homeowners are being fobbed off and left with unsound homes”.

ReportonthePetition20140058ofDuncanAlexanderWebb.pdf

ENDS

References:

http://www.mbie.govt.nz/about/whats-happening/news/2015/report-into-canterbury-residential-repairs-released

https://www.parliament.nz/resource/en-NZ/SCR_72594/fe1b20f5c37c8161bc0aff6c851e9fa11415d60f

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