Measuring outcomes

Measuring progress

The Department continues to develop indicators to measure progress in achieving our intermediate outcomes for the sector.

We have continued to make progress in developing the links between our outputs and the outcomes we seek to achieve. All our achievements seek to contribute to the overall outcome, refined further in our Statement of Intent 2007/10 to ‘the people of New Zealand have access to quality homes and buildings that meet their needs, reflect our environment and contribute to a sustainable New Zealand'.

In our Statement of Intent 2007/10, our outcomes framework depicted the connections between our capability initiatives, outputs and key strategies to deliver our intermediate outcomes, our overall outcome and the Government's priorities. We also identified four intermediate outcomes required in order to achieve the overall outcome.

As a result of the Review of the Accountability Documents, the Department carried out a review of its outcomes, intermediate outcomes and supporting strategies during 2007/08. Having confirmed a revised framework, the Department developed a series of operating intentions to give effect to the intermediate outcomes and overall outcome. This has resulted in a new series of impacts being defined. The Department will establish base measures for each of these impacts from which progress will be measured over the period 2009 to 2011. By doing so we will continue to improve the way we express and measure progress towards our intermediate outcomes.

The Department's progress towards measuring outcomes is summarised in the table below.

If we are making progress towards our intermediate outcomes	We should see	Which will tell us
Buildings and homes that perform well in the New Zealand environment and contribute to sustainability	A framework for a new Building Code that emphasises adaptability and sustainability Increased take up of energy efficiency products such as insulation and solar heating	High performance standards are being set for sustainability and adaptability of new buildings.
A strong, well-performing sector with skilled building and housing professionals	Increases in the ratio of licensed building practitioners to the total sector labour force between 2007 and 2010 Increases in the number of people taking up apprenticeships, education and training in the building sector	Qualified and competent practitioners are working in the industry. Practitioners are being held to account for quality. There is investment in capability and capacity by the sector.
Homes and buildings that meet the changing needs of New Zealanders and contribute to strong, effective communities	The development of measures of building quality using existing or emerging data around weathertightness, consents and determinations	Housing and building needs are increasingly being satisfied by building and housing performance.
Confident building and home owners, tenants and users that value well-designed, well-built, warm, safe and healthy homes and buildings	The development of measures of confidence using existing and emerging data on dispute resolution services Less rental turnover and increased length of tenure Satisfaction with consumer advice, dispute resolution services, eg, Residential Tenancy Services and Weathertight Homes Resolution Services	People are increasingly aware of their obligations and rights.

The Department actively monitors sector outcomes and maintains oversight of the performance of building regulation systems. As part of this role, the Department monitors councils to ensure adherence to standards in the Building Code. Monitoring activities will continue to include conducting technical reviews to ensure building control functions are being carried out to appropriate standards. Our 2007/10 Statement of Intent required us to undertake and complete five technical reviews of territorial authorities in 2007/08; four of these have been completed. Accreditation has been implemented as a new assurance mechanism for building consent authorities, with 53 councils and three private companies accredited, or cleared for accreditation.

Cost-effectiveness of interventions

As the Department, in partnership with stakeholders, evaluates the impact of the reforms, we will continue to assess the appropriateness of our information collection. This will allow us to test whether the reforms have addressed or are addressing the underlying problems they were designed to. These assessments will build on the regulatory effectiveness anticipated at the time the regulatory reforms were expressed in the legislation.

A cost-effectiveness methodology is to be piloted in 2008/09 for the delivery of Residential Tenancy Services and Weathertight Homes Resolution Services. In the meantime, some preliminary work has shown, for example through the customer satisfaction survey for residential tenancy mediation and advice services, that overall the results are very positive with more than 80 percent of clients giving ‘very good ' or ‘excellent ' responses.

There was a 3 percent increase in Tenancy Tribunal application numbers over the last year. The tenancy mediation process resolved more that 28,500 disputes (25,000 were current tenancies). This was more than 3,000 extra disputes resolved compared with the previous year. Tenancy mediation satisfaction continued to be high at 80 percent, with a 10 percent increase in the number of parties rating the tenancy mediator excellent against all attributes.

The likelihood that customers would choose to go through the tenancy mediation process for tenancy disputes was 85 percent, with 73 percent saying this was extremely likely (an increase from 50 percent in 2007). During the same period there was a slight drop in the number of tenancy disputes resolved through adjudication (18,000 disputes). Mediation for tenancy disputes is a more cost effective intervention than adjudication.

The Department of Building and Housing has responsibility for the implementation of the Retirement Villages Act 2003. The Department works closely with the Office of the Retirement Commission which has the statutory duty to monitor the effects of the Act, regulations and Code of Practice. As the Department prepares the terms of reference for the review of the Act, due regard will be given to the cost-effectiveness of the Act for government, industry and society.

Evaluative activity

In 2007/08 the Department started to take a more strategic approach to evaluation. While evaluative activity, such as the surveying of tenants, landlords and other clients of our services continues, the Department has made progress on evaluation frameworks for our building controls function, residential tenancy services and Weathertight Homes Resolution Services.

The aim is that evaluative activity is coordinated, efficient and effective so that only information that will be used is collected, and any relevant changes arising from analysis of the information are implemented and monitored.

There has been a range of other evaluative activity to support the work of the Department in the rental housing market and the housing affordability work programme.

This included:

• commissioning a review of the private rental market in New Zealand. The research sized and profiled the total number of private renter households and the projected growth in this sector. This research will improve the Department's understanding of the private rental market and its trends, along with the property market, social, and policy implications of the trends
• conducting a survey of land zoned residential in the Auckland region to determine its availability for housing
• providing advice on factors affecting institutional investment in residential rental accommodation and options for providing assured security of rental tenure.

During 2007/08 the Department also began the evaluation programme of the reforms delivered by the Weathertight Homes Resolution Services Act 2006.

The Department has been given an expanded role in monitoring performance and trends in the housing market to provide information to territorial authorities on demographics, land supply and building sector productivity to help inform planning decisions.

The Department published four Building and Housing Quarterly Trends Reports in 2007/08.

The Department is one of four core government agencies on a Statistics New Zealand working group that in 2008 is reviewing the Housing Domain Plan (last updated in the 1970s). The review is identifying key strategic information needs and gaps relating to the next 5-10 years (that is, housing-related information for monitoring, analysis and evaluation purposes).

Additionally, the Department has continued to evaluate the efficacy of the regulatory environment in the building consent processing area, and a number of changes have been announced to streamline building consent processes and work is under way to address these. The building consent authority accreditation process, and the technical reviews conducted by the Department, have all contributed to improving the quality and timeliness of building consents, and this remains an area of focus for the Department. An independent evaluation of the building consent authority accreditation process is planned for the 2008/09 year.