The leaky homes problem is turning out to be on the scale of a national disaster, says Tauranga Mayor Stuart Crosby.
He attended a second meeting of the national and local government working group on the issue in Auckland, where the mayors and chief executive officers of the six most affected cities; Wellington, Auckland, North Shore, Waitakere, Christchurch and Tauranga met to consider options.

'There's no single agency that can provide a remedy on their own,” says Stuart. 'It needs to be a multi-agency approach.
'I guess the good news for home owners in this tragic position is that the government wants to take a role in finding the remedy, which was not the position of the previous government.”
One estimate has between 20 and 40 thousand homes affected nationwide. They were built over about a decade between the early 1990s and early 2000s – until the Building Act was changed to require treated framing timbers.
There are leaky homes in Tauranga, says Stuart, but the exact number is not known.
A report on the issue to Building and Construction Minister Maurice Williamson makes assumptions about the national total.
Consultant, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, puts the total cost of the problem at $11.5 billion, more than three times higher than the previous estimate. The number is based on the cost of having to repair all 33,000 homes built during the period. Previously the number of affected homes was thought to be 12,000.
In the bi-monthly building industry on-line publication, Build, Maurice says the repair bill will be about $3.6 billion, over some 20,000 properties.
He's promising the whole resolution process will be revamped.
'The whole weather tight resolution process so far has seen huge chunks of money go into the hands of lawyers and litigation and tribunals and almost nothing going into fixing rotting buildings,” says Maurice.
The PriceWaterhouseCooper report goes further, stating leaky home owners come out of the process with funds exhausted on legal bills and without enough left to undertake repairs.
'Hundreds of millions of dollars is going into the hands of lawyers and building experts,” says Stuart. 'That should be directed into fixing homes, that's the issue. We need to find a better way.”
Maurice Williamson will be reporting back to Prime Minister John Key before any announcement is made about a way forward.
'I would hope to hear back before Christmas, but there's a lot of work to do between times,” says Stuart.