David Seymour’s sympathy for a ruined retirement is far from adequate

Friday, 21 November 2025

ACT leader David Seymour recently cited the story of a constituent who faced a huge bill for ultimately unnecessary earthquake strengthening to bolster the case for his Regulatory Standards Act.

Kathy Spencer worked in public policy for over 30 years, including as a deputy director-general in the Ministry of Health, a general manager in ACC, and a manager in the Treasury.

OPINION: ACT leader David Seymour has been sharing the unfortunate story of his constituent “Robin”, in his November 18 article, Undoing the damage done by earthquake strengthening law.

Seymour describes how the body corporate of Robin’s Auckland apartment building decided to do maintenance work that triggered a requirement for expensive earthquake-strengthening. Robin had to contribute a significant part of her savings, move out of her apartment building, and will no longer be able to enjoy the type of retirement she had planned.

Under new rules announced in October by Chris Penk, Auckland, Northland and the Chatham Islands will be exempt from earthquake-strengthening requirements. If Robin and her fellow apartment owners had simply deferred their maintenance, they would have avoided earthquake strengthening costs altogether.

Seymour expresses sympathy for Robin’s situation then says: “It’s too late for Robin, how can we ensure things like this don’t happen again?” He goes on to promote his flagship Regulatory Standards Act 2025 – enacted on November 13, and coming into force next year.

Under the new act, officials will provide a consistency accountability statement that checks whether a piece of legislation complies with the act’s principles for good law making.

Hundreds of buildings up and down the country were required to bear notices of potential risk under previous legislation.

Would a consistency accountability statement have made any difference back in 2016, when the earthquake-prone building legislation was passed? I doubt it.

At the time, there was a regulatory impact statement that made it clear that the costs of strengthening buildings far outweighed the benefits. Several MPs spoke of the high costs for owners, noting that it would likely cost $10,000 - $20,000 just to have a building assessed by an engineer. Submissions suggested there would need to be financial support, especially for owners of heritage buildings.

Seymour himself argued for Auckland and other low seismic areas to be exempt, and offered to support the legislation if that change was made. In the end, the change wasn’t made and he was the sole MP to vote against the bill – for which, kudos.

Parliament’s answer to unaffordable costs was to provide long timeframes for the identification and remediation of earthquake-prone buildings, that varied according to seismic risk and building use. Unfortunately, allowing ample time didn’t make the work any cheaper – it would likely still be uneconomic or unaffordable 10 or 20 years out, and in the meantime earthquake-prone buildings would be hard to rent out, sell, or insure.

In reality, reports like regulatory impact statements and consistency accountability statements are not a reliable way to stop flawed legislation and Seymour recognises that. Ironically, Seymour’s own officials prepared a regulatory impact statement that argued that the Regulatory Standards Bill was not the best way to improve the quality of regulation. It was passed anyway because National and NZ First had committed their support in the coalition agreements.

Of course, Seymour is right that we can’t return to 2016 and do things differently. However, it’s not too late to provide compensation for people who have spent large sums of money to do strengthening work that is no longer considered necessary.

Robin, and others like her, have been severely disadvantaged by complying with a piece of legislation that, based on information known at the time, should never have been passed.

Nearly 3000 buildings are set to be removed from New Zealand’s earthquake prone register under a major government overhaul. Building and Construction Minister Chris Pink says the changes will focus on high-risk structures and ease costs for owners.

Chris Penk was asked about this when he appeared on Jack Tame’s Q & A programme in early October. Penk said that he didn’t seriously contemplate compensation, arguing the appropriate role for government was simply to reduce the requirements that it imposed on people.

In a futile attempt to appease those who are seriously out of pocket, he added that no-one who has spent money should be disappointed about having a better, stronger building.

After Penk’s changes are made to earthquake-prone buildings legislation, only an estimated 300 or so buildings in areas of medium-high seismic risk will still need substantial remediation.

In my view, the small number of remaining buildings puts the government in an excellent position to share strengthening costs with private owners.

Without financial support, the required strengthening will likely continue to be uneconomic or unaffordable, and the work won’t be done. In an earthquake, a building that is shedding masonry or collapsing can cause many deaths and injuries, including to people nearby, as happened in Christchurch.

Another factor to take into account is that central government will itself make very large savings from this policy change because the number of earthquake-prone buildings owned by Health, Fire & Emergency, Education and Justice is expected to fall from 90 to 15, freeing up resources.

Finally, providing support would be more in line with international practice. According to MBIE, it is unusual for countries to place mandatory requirements for seismic strengthening on private building owners.

It’s not enough to decree that strengthening work be done. Unless the work is actually completed, we won’t be any safer when the next major earthquake hits.