Auditor-General criticises EQC over complaint handling, praises cost-control

The Earthquake Commission hasn't done enough to improve the way it handles complaints from property owners but has improved cost control, Auditor-General Lyn Provost says in a follow-up to her 2013 report on the EQC's repair programme for quake-damaged homes in Canterbury

Provost concludes the EQC has taken on some of the recommendations of her 2013 report, which found its performance was "mixed".

Two years on improvements have been made, but the Auditor-General says the EQC can't easily identify all complaints about the programme, has no formal process to improve the way it handles complaints and is too focused on closing rather than fully resolving complaints.

The report says there are too many repeat or multiple complaints, while in the past year the proportion of complaints about the quality of repairs had also increased. The EQC estimates 8-to-10 percent of homes repaired in the programme have required follow-up fixes. It also found that repairs for vulnerable customers were also not completed significantly sooner than for other customers, although, on average, work orders were issued to begin the repair work sooner.

However the EQC won praise for managing the cost of repairs. Increases in those costs since February 2011 are below the Canterbury inflation rate for work on new homes.

As of June 2015, about $2.7 billion had been spent on the programme, with 66,252 repairs "practically completed", 1,018 primary substantive repairs in progress, and 1,767 primary substantive repairs yet to start. An estimated 2,923 repairs already carried out require further investigation to determine whether further work is required.

The Minister responsible for the Earthquake Commission, Gerry Brownlee, said the EQC was committed to improving. "There are areas highlighted by the Auditor General where EQC is looking to improve, and as her report says, EQC is learning the lessons from the programme and is committed to applying them to its future work".

He praised the body for controlling its costs "One of the Auditor General's key findings is that EQC has managed to effectively manage repair-cost inflation through the implementation of the home repair programme, which was a primary reason for its establishment," he said.

The programme has also taken longer than expected. EQC's target date for ending the programme was originally set at December 2015, but this organisation brought the date forward to December 2014, only to miss the target, which it later called a "stretch target". It hasn't set a new end date.

(BusinessDesk)