Compliance monitoring and enforcement metrics – the Canterbury context
Te Uru Tahika has released its 2023/24 Compliance Monitoring and Enforcement Metrics report. The report compares the performance and outputs of regional councils and unitary authorities in their compliance role.
There are aspects of the report that highlight the challenges the region faces. It’s important to understand that demographic and geographical factors make each regional council and unitary authority unique. No two are alike - Waitaha/Canterbury has a large and vastly varied environment, and our role is similarly complex.
Download the Compliance Monitoring and Enforcement Metrics Report 2023/2024.
What makes Waitaha unique?
There are more than 26,000 active consents in Waitaha – around twice as many as any other regional council.
These come with around 416,000 conditions that must be met before a consent can be said to be compliant. We have thousands of relatively simple consents, and a few more complex ones, some with hundreds of conditions.
The number of consents and consent conditions is partly due to the complexity of the regulatory framework at both the national and regional level, but also due to the environmental challenges of the Waitaha region and the types of activity that take place here.
For instance, the region makes up 20 per cent of farmed land in Aotearoa/New Zealand and has 64 per cent of the country’s irrigated land. This activity comes with a wide range of compliance requirements. The region is also home to the second largest city in Aotearoa, which broadens the range of consents still further.
All this, coupled with the fact that Waitaha is the largest geographical region by far, with the second largest population, and it’s easy to appreciate how challenging our work can be.
Finding the balance – improving our approach
The Waitaha region's unique make up and the regulatory frameworks we work with means we need to take a balanced approach to our compliance tasks according to the time and financial resources available.
For instance, while we do collect, record and assess 100 per cent of complaints and incidences that come in to us, during 2023/24 we were able to actively respond to 78 per cent of these.
We have to allocate and prioritise our resources when doing our compliance work, but we realise we haven’t always done that effectively.
This is why we’re committed to improving the way we go about our compliance role and the way we work alongside consent holders and the community to ensure better results.
This includes introducing new processes in compliance monitoring that use time and resources more effectively.
It’s about finding a balance between accepting the unique challenges the region poses, being respectful of ratepayer’s funds, and ensuring better outcomes for the environment.
Find out more about our compliance approach and our project to improve compliance monitoring.
More information
- More on farming plans, consents and compliance
- More on our 2023/24 compliance monitoring
- Responding to environment incidents – our enforcement tools.