Council aware of audit failings

Eight months before the Loafers Lodge fire, the building regulator told Wellington City Council it was doing six to 10 times too few safety checks on buildings, and to do more.

MBIE told the council that riskier buildings, such as boarding houses, were even more in need of the better on-site checks.

Overall, the council was running at under 4% of buildings audited a year, when it should be at 20 to 33%.

‘‘This number is well below what we would expect for an effective auditing regime,’’ MBIE said last September in a 2022 assessment it gave the council.

The council also was doing too little enforcement when it found faults, the ministry found.

The council released the MBIE assessment on Tuesday, in response to RNZ questions for over a week.

At the same time, it admitted last auditing Loafers Lodge in 2018 – when it found blockages at fire exits and smokestop doors wedged open, and a noncompliant card access system – and 2012.

Councils have long known that short-term accommodation is the highest risk, and MBIE’s guidelines say to audit these buildings once a year.

MBIE registered its ‘‘disappointment’’ at the council’s audits, said it was not doing enough enforcement either, and faulted it in five others ways, while passing it in others.

‘‘It is disappointing to see that these on-site audits do not currently feature as highly in WCC’s administration and enforcement of the compliance schedule/ BWoF system,’’ the ministry said.

The audits were ‘‘a fundamental activity of the BWoF system’’, it said. ‘‘The frequency [of audits] of a given building should reflect

the perceived risk for the use of that building.’’

MBIE said audits were a double-check that independent companies hired to check safety systems like fire alarms, smokestop doors, evacuation routes and sprinklers were getting it right when they signed off on them.

This system of checks by private contractors has previously been found to be patchy, partly because it has not been closely monitored or regulated.

MBIE has since 2020 been trying to improve its monitoring.

Loafers had 13 systems that had been signed off. There was

nothing to suggest that these were signed off inaccurately.

The audits provide the backup to this.

The lack of audits by Wellington City was slapped with the ministry’s lowest, dark-red score, requiring ‘‘corrective action’’ by the council.

Six other weaknesses copped a slightly lower orange ‘‘strong recommendations’’ score.

These six included being too soft on enforcement. The council issued zero Notices to Fix over building warrants of fitness in the three years from May 2019, and five infringement notices.

‘‘Use of enforcement is often an indicator of a council’s willingness to use the tools available to ensure compliance,’’ the ministry said.

The council claimed yesterday it was auditing between a fifth and a third of the city’s 2800 commercial buildings each year.

But by the ministry’s assessment, audits had been running at 3.3% – and that figure concurs with the council’s own data (193 on-site checks in 21⁄ years). RNZ has asked the council to clarify its claim.

The council late yesterday clarified that it had begun tightening its audits only after the ministry told it off, in the months before Loafers Lodge caught fire.

A new policy aimed at audits on a three-year cycle to hit the 20 to 33% target was adopted at the end of last year, it told RNZ.

However, the ministry appeared to pull its punches in its report to Wellington City.

Having earlier in 2022 told all councils that ‘‘buildings with sleeping uses such as backpackers’ hostels – annual audits are recommended’’, it told Wellington in September that ‘‘it might be appropriate to have annual audits for budget accommodation (eg backpackers’ hostel) and five-yearly audits for lowoccupancy industrial buildings’’.

The ministry did not aim to do anything more about it. Its team ‘‘have no plans to follow up further in relation to the strong recommendations in the report’’, but if the council wanted to tell it what it was doing about this, that would be welcome, MBIE told the council.