Ryan Bridge: Building new houses on flood-prone land - here we go again

Early Edition with Ryan Bridge

Here we go again, everybody. They’re planning to build yet more houses on land that we know is partial to flooding.

This time, it's the Coalition Government, with three housing projects on its fast-track list in Auckland and Canterbury.

In 2022 it was Labour, they had 700 homes on their fast-track list that were prone to flooding.

You might think, well, if you want to go and build your house on flood-prone land after Cyclone Gabrielle, et cetera, that's your issue. You pay up.

But here's the problem with that: we have no hard and fast rule about what rate payers and or taxpayers might have to stump up for compensation. You know, do we buy these houses out? How does it work?

If they build and it floods, our collective insurance premiums go up. Just this week, we had a letter from big insurers to the Prime Minister and others saying we can't keep up with these payouts, with the increased weather events, et cetera – premiums are going to have to rock it up, stop allowing development on low lying land.

There's been a select committee report on this, saying we need rules from the government, we need certainty, and we do.

Who pays what to whom and when, we just don't know.

And in the meantime, you would think the land that might be at risk of flooding would be put on a slow, rather than a fast track.

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