• By Christopher Luxon, Prime Minister and MP for Botany

Making it easier and more affordable to build in New Zealand is part of our Government’s plan to deliver economic growth, which will create more jobs, higher wages, and help Kiwis deal with the cost of living.

We know New Zealand needs to build more of everything – houses, roads, hospitals, schools, and more.

However, red tape and bureaucracy has made it difficult and expensive to build and get stuff done.

This Government is focused on ways we can make it cheaper and easier to build, while removing the unnecessary rules and regulations to make sure our hard-working tradies can focus on what they do best.

Construction costs have risen 40 per cent since 2019, spurred on by a lack of competition in our building sector. The status quo is unacceptable.

That’s why our Government is working on a raft of measures designed to make building quicker and cheaper.

We’ve just passed legislation that will put up to 250,000 more building products on shelves this year alone, meaning you’ll have more options when building or renovating your home.

Bringing hundreds of thousands of new options into the market will put downward pressure on prices, improving competition and affordability.

From July, more than 12,000 essential products such as plasterboard, cladding and insulation will be cleared for use.

Increasing options on the market is good not only for prices and competition but also for supply chain resilience.

To ensure the standard of new products, we’ll establish proper regulations so only top-quality materials will enter the market.

We’re also making changes to back our builders by cracking down on cowboys.

Our tradies are highly skilled and hardworking, but some high-profile examples of poor workmanship are tarring the good work of the majority of our builders.

We’re going to remove regulations that choke productivity in our building system, while having checks and balances in the system to prevent shoddy work.

We’ll improve the complaints process, while strengthening disciplinary and transparency processes for builders to ensure the few cowboys who let the industry down face proper consequences.

Finally, you may have recently heard you won’t need consents to build 70 square metre granny flats, so more families can build without jumping through hoops.

These changes are expected to see 13,000 more granny flats built over the next decade, giving families more affordable, flexible housing options.

These changes are just the start. There’s more to come as we get on with fixing the consenting system.

We’re going to keep cutting through the red tape and failed regulatory system that’s made it so hard to get things done, because it needs to be quicker and cheaper to build in New Zealand.