Informer 265: 9 July 2015

From Thursday 23 July 2015 we are changing our consent process to align the time we allow to gain consent with the industry best practice of 30 calendar days.

What's happening?

We are making a change to the consenting approval time frame for Rights of Way (ROW) residents and Multi-Dwelling Unit (MDU) owners or body corporates.

This change means that orders will be cancelled if residents and building owners have not responded to consent requests within 30 days rather than the previous 90 days. We are also introducing better visibility of the consents process by:

• providing you with a list of the parties we’re seeking consent from
• letting you know when we are intending to cancel the request
• providing a process for you to raise any exceptions for us to consider

What's the detail?

Following last year's industry agreement on a consenting best practice, we’ve been seeking feedback on our approach to MDU and ROW consenting. This has included our initial thoughts on how to move towards the consenting industry best practice.

We’ve taken on-board your feedback and we will now implement the industry best practice by reducing the time before orders associated with unresponsive consent requests are cancelled to 30 days. This applies for all orders submitted from Thursday 23 July 2015. Orders submitted prior to this date will still be managed under the 90 day cancellation limit.

If consent has not been gained after 30 days and there is no likelihood of consent being given, the order will be cancelled and there is a stand down period of six months before another order will be accepted for the ROW or MDU. There may be some exceptions to the cancellation rule and we will place a comment within the order to tell you if we intend to keep the request open. An example of this could be where we are awaiting building owner contribution.

To support this new process, we are giving you better visibility of each consent:

• We will enter the list of people/parties we’ve seeking consent from in the Chorus Portal order (not in OO&T). This information will not indicate which parties have or have not provided consent due to privacy issues. We’re aiming to provide the list of parties by the third working day of the consenting process to allow us to focus on the up-front assessment and consent request in the first instance.
• If your customer believes they do not reside in an MDU or on a ROW, or if you become aware of any new developments which we should consider before cancelling a request, then you can let us know via: Chorus_NGA@chorus.co.nz
• We will continue to apply the six month consenting stand down process for those requests that fail to gain approval. However if there are any specific developments which you think we need to consider, such as a change of ownership, then let us know via Chorus_NGA@chorus.co.nz and we will consider it on a case-by-case basis.

There is more information on the updated consenting process, including the TCF UFB consenting best practice document and more details of what you will see in Chorus Portal available on our customer website.

Who do I contact?

For more information please contact your Chorus Service Delivery Manager.