Aucklanders revamping their home or building a new one face delays in getting the work approved.
Auckland City Council says on average it's taking a month for the organisation to process Compliance Certificates - four days longer than usual. There's also a backlog of about 950 applications.
"We're not normally in this situation," council building consent manager Ian McCormick told media at a press conference earlier today.
"It's unacceptable and I'm actually embarrassed to be hear telling you about it. Obviously we're a transparent organisation and we're doing our best to address it at speed and we are driving it down really quickly."
The council says the delay and backlog are to due to a high turnover of staff and a sharp rise in the number of applications. A higher number of complex applications and problems with their administration system are also slowing up the process.
While this time of year is typically busy as people try to get approval before Christmas, this year there have been 700 more applications than in 2016.
Any new building work - for both commercial and residential - or alterations to existing property must be signed off by the council and issued a Code of Compliance Certificate. This proves the buillding work complies with the approved plans.
Mr McCormack urged those applying for the consent to help ease the council's workload by making sure their application is correct.
"Quite often we're seeing quite a bit of product substitution and it's important we have all the documentation we need to be able to confirm that the building work will comply with the building code," he says.
He asked people not to call the council to check where their consent was as this would only hold up the process up further.
The council says they're throwing a lot of resources and time at fixing the issue and says the backlog should be processed by Christmas.
Newshub.
