| Thursday, October 18, 2012 7:32 AM

I was very pleased to see while I was away that the Supreme Court overturned the Appeal Court decision over leaky homes involving the former North Shore City Council in Auckland.

In a nutshell, the council were trying to avoid any sort of blame for the fact they gave the consent for these places to be built. For some reason a court was found in their favour, but fortunately the Supreme Court has seen sense.

Perhaps the most galling part of all of this is that beyond the sheer hell so many homeowners have had to go through and the stress and the cost and the uncertainty, is the fact a government body, who insisted you needed their permission to build, was then found to be trying to walk away.

It’s not entirely their fault of course, the builders are equally as responsible, and many of them have done runners by going broke or changing the name of their company. But the council set up a system, which to be perfectly honest you could mount a not insubstantial argument, that wasn’t really required.

I mean you shouldn’t be allowed to build just anything, and there should be rules around boundaries and height and so on, but as always when it comes to councils they went nuts and the red tape, even for jobs that worked out fine, was far more complex than it ever needed to be.

And with all that came the cost. So in any build you’re forking out thousands just for rubber stamps. So given that, how they ever thought they could ever walk away from the responsibility, given they’re the ones who created it, is beyond me.

Not to mention the fact that in trying to walk away, that involves courts and lawyers and costs for all those who are chasing them.

Morally, they’re bankrupt.

And yes to a degree, central government is involved as well, given they’re the ones who charged the councils with operating the compliance systems in the first place. It’s a galling business – watching public officialdom run for the hills. Especially given very few of us are fans of what they do anyway.

And making it worse, as much as you want to support the poor, old homeowners who have to go through all of this – you know full well that if and when justice is delivered, the bill is going to end up in our letterboxes by way of increased rates. Given that’s the only way they ever got any money in the first place.

If the councils are whacked with massive fines and legal bills and reparation costs – guess who gets to pay for it. Which brings us back to the beginning.

Councils need to be in the business of core service and nothing more. Not in housing, not in social services. Just rubbish and footpaths and parks. Because the lesson here is the more they get involved in, the more trouble they become.

Photo: Edward Swift