Wayne Mapp National Housing Spokesperson

20 October 2002

National calls for more action on rotting homes

National is challenging the Government to take further steps to address the multi-million dollar rotting homes crisis.

Around 60 people who attended a meeting organised by National in Nelson this afternoon were told by Housing spokesperson, Wayne Mapp, that the Government hasn't got to grips with the scale of the problem, and is moving too slowly to resolve it.

"National has a three-point plan to address this crisis. The plan is aimed at gauging the size of the problem, dealing immediately with the Building Code and preventing problems with leaky buildings in the future," said Dr Mapp.

"It calls for an immediate assessment of the scale of the crisis and the professionalism of inspections, urges changes to the Building Code in line with the Hunn report recommendations and deals with longer-term issues around industry training and compliance.

"The Government must act now to fix the Building Code and find out the true extent of the problem. It's taken it nearly a month to adopt National's dispute resolution process, so let's hope it doesn't take another month to fix the Code. Otherwise expect to see thousands more homes being built, which could rot."

Dr Mapp told the meeting that Internal Affairs Minister, George Hawkins, had failed to take the issue of rotting homes seriously.

"Mr Hawkins talks about the Government being solution-focussed so we've offered to help him understand the problem better by inviting him to our next public meeting, in the North Shore tomorrow night," (Monday 21/10) said Dr Mapp.

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