Standard number 3604<\/a> states how big a beam must be to hold up a roof or how to construct eaves to keep out the rain. It is aimed to make it quicker and easier and cheaper to build, and can be used as a guide if a defective building went to dispute.<\/p>\nIt covers a thousand other details in its 450 pages for the straightforward building with timber. But it is also 15 years old and Standards New Zealand says is undergoing “significant” changes, and it is asking for input.<\/p>\n
But Standards NZ has also added new online controls, so only two pages can be accessed at a time and the draft can not be downloaded.<\/p>\n
‘It wasn’t going to work’<\/p>\n
Structural engineers John Scarry and Daniel Langford said they were exasperated and have protested to ministers.<\/p>\n
“Lots of engineers who use the existing version all the time were all wanting to review it, and as soon as they saw the format, they knew it wasn’t going to work,” Scarry said.<\/p>\n
“They’re missing out on thousands of free hours of engineers who would be happy to do a review if they if they opened it up and made it easy for everyone, but currently it’s just too difficult,” said Langford.<\/p>\n
Combat misuse – and AI<\/p>\n
Standards NZ said it was providing better and more modern viewability, while also protecting its intellectual property and lowering the risk of the draft of a crucial standard being circulated and used in place of the final version.<\/p>\n
“We are moving away from having only PDF formats, to offering digital formats, which helps mitigate the possibility of draft material being circulated and used when it may be quite different from the final published content. This is especially relevant to large and complex standards,” said national manager Malcolm MacMillan.<\/p>\n
Engineering New Zealand spokesperson Richard Templer said he sympathised with this in the face of a new risk from AI.<\/p>\n
“That’s certainly the discussions we’ve had with them. Their particular concern around intellectual property is the fact that standards are being harvested by AI.<\/p>\n
“If at some point in the future you want to do some timber design, you could query ChatGPT.”<\/p>\n
Standards NZ said bots scraping standards content was “another market challenge” it was aware of, but that was not the driver in this case.<\/p>\n
Similar problems – including pages closing down quickly – with the new online controls have cropped up in the review of another common standard (3404), for things such as simple steel frames for houses.<\/p>\n
Scarry said they must get the standards right, since they covered billions of dollars worth of building.<\/p>\n
“Omissions and confusing clauses can have enormous impact on consumers downstream when something goes wrong. And so it’s important to make these documents as clear as possible.”<\/p>\n
He had seen this in legal disputes over poor earthquake repairs where he was an expert witness, he said.<\/p>\n
‘Likely to diminish’<\/p>\n
Standards NZ said it had made changes to make 3604 easier to review – dismissed by Scarry and Langford as tweaks – and foresaw people getting used to the new approach.<\/p>\n
“We are confident that as familiarity and confidence grows around these ways to submit, many concerns are likely to diminish,” said MacMillan.<\/p>\n
But Langford predicted a different result.<\/p>\n
“We’re just going to get a standard with a whole bunch of errors in it and it just won’t be that useful or helpful and we’ll end up having to do detailed design anyway.”<\/p>\n
Templer said industry bodies like his would persevere on having input, but many small businesses would not be able to afford the extra effort.<\/p>\n
‘Older and older and older’<\/p>\n
Standards NZ was just trying to make the user-pays system work when it was flawed, Templer said.<\/p>\n
“There is insufficient funding to cover the process, so it takes a long time, uses a lot of volunteer time.<\/p>\n
“It’s been well supported by MBIE, but in other cases standards just are getting older and older and older.”<\/p>\n
New Zealand has split away from some standards it shares with Australia because it can not afford to help update them. In 2024, Master Electricians reported more than 500 joint standards had been “de-jointed” since 2016 when Standards NZ was absorbed into the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment.<\/p>\n
As charges to industry have risen – up 12.5 percent last year – some firms faced paying more than $20,000 a year for a full catalogue of updated standards, said Engineering NZ.<\/p>\n
Cut-price standards were discontinued to some engineers two years ago.<\/p>\n
“When we talk to ministers, they understand the problem – what they’re trying to do is find a solution in a fiscally constrained environment,” said Templer.<\/p>\n
“Companies are paying a realistic rate for the standard. The problem is there aren’t enough companies purchasing the standard to make that equation work. And if you were to dramatically increase the price of the standards, people would stop buying them.”<\/p>\n
‘Work is underway’<\/p>\n
Frustrated engineers have lobbied Engineering NZ, and it had lobbied ministers for more than a year.<\/p>\n
Scarry and Langford wrote to Commerce and Consumer Affairs Minister Cameron Brewer, and Templer met him last week.<\/p>\n
“The idea that the circulation of draft editions ‘that could be misused in the future’ is a nonsense,” Scarry told him.<\/p>\n
“A two page at a time web viewer may be adequate for choosing dishes for a conference lunch from a caterer’s menu… but it is totally inadequate for the proper reading, comprehension, understanding and review of such large and complex documents as NZS 3604 and NZS 3404.”<\/p>\n
MacMillan said the government had asked for advice on how to improve the whole system.<\/p>\n
“This work is underway and includes looking at a more sustainable funding model.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Key standards for building houses are old – but a new approach to updating them has engineers warning…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":571020,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[111,43,139,69],"class_list":["post-571019","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/571019","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=571019"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/571019\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/571020"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=571019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=571019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=571019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}