Recipe for shoddy building

By BERNARD ORSMAN

"Without registration anyone can be a builder - all you need is a ute, a dog and a loud radio."

That was the recipe industry veteran Stuart Thomson gave yesterday to MPs looking into the leaking building crisis.

Fifty years ago, Mr Thomson and his father built three Mediterranean-style homes in Wellington.

They were made of fibre-cement and did not have eaves.

"They did not leak and are still standing," Mr Thomson, 74, told the government administration select committee in Auckland yesterday on the second day of its inquiry.

He has been in the building industry for 56 years and is now a roofing consultant and a member of two New Zealand-Australia standards committees.

The root of the problems was a decline in trade skills, said Mr Thomson.

"There is nothing inherently wrong with fibre-cement board or even untreated timber. People cause leaks. We are seeing the symptoms, not the cause."

He said the deregulation policies of National and Labour governments and their intention that market forces would self-regulate the building industry had failed.

Mr Thomson called for a return to the apprenticeship system, with a contract between a worker and an employer to provide the practical learning skills, and schooling to provide the education.

The blind leading the blind with no exams, no registration, no compulsion and no mechanism was a recipe for failure, he said.

Mark Maiden, the general manager of Koolfoam Industries, also supported reintroduction of the apprenticeship scheme.

Mr Maiden, who served an apprenticeship under the old system of block courses and 8000 hours of time, said more had to be done to promote the advantages of being a tradesman.

He called for fewer labour-only contracts, better-defined chains of responsibility on building sites and for a person on site to hold a certificate proving he or she had passed certain standards, including window and door flashing installation.

The committee saw the problem first-hand when John Edwards and Scot Robertson, of Plaster Systems, produced a piece of 25cm by 5cm untreated pine that arrived on a building site in Tauranga 10 days ago already rotting.

The timber was crumbling in places and was infected with brown rot.

Mr Robertson said the pine was from five packets of timber, of about 5cu m each, returned to the timber merchant because they were rotting.

* If you have information about leaking buildings,
email the Herald or fax (09) 373-6421.

Further reading
Feature: Leaky buildings

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