The Licensed Building Practitioners Scheme : four years on.

Abstract

The Licensed Building Practitioners Scheme (LBP Scheme), restricting certain aspects of the design and construction of residential buildings in New Zealand to licensed building personnel, was a Government initiative passed into law in March 2012.

The Scheme was a response to a strongly critical review of the lack of quality inherent within the New Zealand building industry by the 2002 report of the Overview Group on Weathertightness of Buildings.

This paper will reexamine the original submissions and conclusions about the veracity of the Scheme from a qualitative survey conducted 6 months after the LBPS introduction in 2012 and will compare those results to a recently completed industry survey of prominently placed industry personnel, some 4 years on. The paper will test whether the legislative and educational systems needed to support the new roles, deemed essential in the original survey for the Scheme’s success, have had time to coalesce and prove their effectiveness in lifting the quality of design and construction necessary to meet the future challenges facing the New Zealand building industry.