Compliance monitoring

Greater Wellington is responsible for checking that consent holders comply with their consent conditions. When a consent is issued, it is categorised as either high, medium, or low risk based on various factors including:  

• The nature and scale of actual and potential effects
• Previous environmental performance (if relevant)
• Any priority or weight given to the activity in the Natural Resources Plan and/or Whaitua
• Any national regulations and/or relevant local community considerations  

Once compliance monitoring is completed for the year, an overall compliance rating is given as follows:  

1. Full compliance (all conditions – no further action required)
2. Low risk non-compliance (most conditions met – some action may be required)
3. Moderate non-compliance (some conditions not met – action required)
4. Significant non-compliance (many conditions are not met – immediate action required)

Any monitoring of resource consents is charged back to consent holders. Monitoring charges are often less for consent holders with full compliance compared to consent holders with non-compliance as more time is required to address non-compliance issues.  

In summary, our approach to resource consent monitoring is to direct more resources and monitoring effort to high risk activities, some resources into medium risk activities, and minimal or nil resources into low risk activities. You can find out more about this in our Compliance Monitoring & Enforcement Policy (PDF 13 MB) .