Building consents : Christchurch City Council

The Christchurch City Council is responsible for issuing building consents within Christchurch and Banks Peninsula.

COVID-19 update

Under the Orange setting of the COVID-19 Protection Framework, onsite building inspections and processing of building consents will continue.

If appropriate safety protocols are not in place on a worksite, our building inspectors will be unable to carry out the booked inspection. In these cases, we will need to charge our normal inspection fee for the visit.

Please provide construction documentation requested by an inspector by emailing buildinginspections@ccc.govt.nz as we work to ensure that we can continue to provide services and to reduce the chances of COVID-19 transmission.

Processing delays

16 May 2022 update:

A high volume of building consent applications, including those of increased complexity are continuing to cause delays in our processing timeframes.
Our current wait times to start processing a consent application are:
- Residential – Solid fuel heater applications: up to 14 working days
- Residential – Low complexity applications: up to 21 working days
- Residential – All other applications: up to 14 weeks
- Commercial: Five to 10 working days

Thank you for your patience while we work through this.

What we're doing

We have new staff currently undergoing training, and recruitment for more staff is continuing.
We are upskilling our current staff in order to process higher complexity applications.
We are currently using contractors to process applications.
We continue to explore other initiatives to help get us through the amount of work in front of us.

What you can do to help

Where possible, get relevant approvals from other areas of Council, such as resource consent and three waters, before applying for building consent.
Please ensure you complete all fields and provide the required supporting documents when completing your application.

In response to a request for information (RFI):

include a list of the changes you have made
include only the relevant pages
mark all changes with a cloud for easy identification.

Find out more

You can apply for a building consent online. For advice prior to applying for a building consent contact DutyBCO@ccc.govt.nz

For more information about inspections, or to book, please phone our Inspections Support Team on 03 941 8222 or 0800 800 169.

A building consent is a formal approval to undertake building work in accordance with approved plans and specifications. A building consent establishes that your proposed building work complies with the building code.

After we have issued the building consent we undertake inspections during construction and issue a code compliance certificate when the building work is all completed.