Does EQC culture need a re-repair?

Many in Christchurch will have reacted with disbelief at the spectacle of former Earthquake Commission (EQC) minister Gerry Brownlee taking criticisms of EQC’s performance personally, especially given the bluntness with which he has been known to attack his own critics. Who could ever forget his dismissal of the ‘‘carping and moaning’’ of homeowners stuck on TC3 land after the 2011 earthquake?

But in a way, Brownlee is old news. It is important that we move on from the ultimately inconsequential issue of whether Brownlee’s feelings have been hurt by recent coverage of EQC’s woes and onto the nature of the woes themselves. Both the context and the culture matter.

In much the same way that the new Government has only just learned of the depth of problems in the health system, illustrated by the conditions at Middlemore Hospital, so too is new EQC Minister Megan Woods struggling to comprehend the ballooning scale of EQC’s re-repair bill.

It seems astonishing that a Government minister should find herself in a similar position to news organisations such as Stuff and RNZ, who have fought long battles to see the EQC numbers. Woods told Stuff this week that she has been unable to obtain her own cost figures and asked Treasury to provide more information at an urgent meeting. Woods’ problem is that Government may have to top up the EQC fund, while having no idea how many more re-repairs have not yet been identified.

Woods has previously said, when accepting Sir Maarten Wevers’ resignation as chairman, that she wanted greater ‘‘clarity’’ from EQC. The events of this week would imply that this clarity has not yet arrived.

Readers and viewers certainly feel like they are in the dark. Brownlee estimated in 2016 that EQC’s fixes of its own substandard earthquake repairs would cost around $60 million to $70m. Two years later, that figure has swollen to $270m. It covers more than 11,000 homes that needed a second repair.

Nearly 1100 of the re-repairs needed more much work done, pushing them over EQC’s $100,000 liability cap and into the hands of private insurers.

Of the $270m, $100m went to homeowners who arranged their own re-repairs. The remaining $170m of rerepairs were handled by EQC. Brownlee has argued that in the scheme of things, $170m is not a large sum. Readers can draw their own conclusions.

The EQC story points to greater problems in the management of the post-earthquake period. Many homeowners lacked confidence in both the assessments of their damaged homes by EQC agents and the repair process that followed. The expanding scale of re-repairs shows those doubts were often justified.

But this perception of a lack of care was the inevitable flipside of an urgency in the assessment and repair programme. Would Cantabrians have tolerated waiting longer to have their homes assessed and repaired if they knew there was less chance of needing a re-repair in the future? It is easy to forget, seven years later, the desperation felt by many who were stuck in homes that were broken and unhealthy.

We wanted our homes fixed quickly. Of course, we also wanted them fixed well, once and for all.