Challenges facing building code compliance in New Zealand

Abstract

Ensuring resilience in New Zealand built environment requires regular building code amendments. These amendments have caused some shortfall in complying with the changes. The compliance problems have limited the usefulness of building regulations in the country. This study aims to investigate and explore the challenges facing compliance with the building code amendments and how compliance could be improved. A closed-ended questionnaire was administered to the relevant stakeholders in the building industry to seek their individual opinions on the challenges facing compliance with the changes made to the building code. Some of the challenges considered in this study are within the areas of inadequate compliance features, organisational factors, lack of technical training and assistance, lack of building code enforcement, unforeseen consequences of building code amendment and inadequate awareness following building code changes. This study identified some of the challenges facing compliance with building code. The findings in this study reported a high level of respondents that agreed that complexities in the building code, lack of capacity building among the relevant stakeholder, lack of training need assessment, irregular building code update and lack of awareness. However, the study reported a low proportion of corruption, showing that corruption is not an issue in the New Zealand building control system. Improvement in the training of building code users on how to comply with the changes made to the building code should be considered in the future amendment. The paper concludes that most of the challenges confronting building code compliance could be minimised through proactive training, raising awareness and provision of resourceful technical supports to the code users. Also, the paper recommends that building code amendment process should be utilised to address the identified challenges facing building code compliance while simplifying the code requirements.