Late last year, Watercare Services published maps identifying areas in Auckland where there are water and/ or wastewater constraints in the public, reticulated services.  This was the start of some confusing and sometimes project defining investigations for people and is still being worked through in many areas.

What’s the issue?

Most residential development relies on water, wastewater and stormwater connections to public infrastructure- while you can technically service development on the actual site, this usually takes up a lot of land and most residential sites don’t have enough space for it.

If your sites in a “live zone “ (i.e. zoned in the Auckland Unitary Plan for residential development now), most developers assume that development of that site has been taken into account in infrastructure planning, and that their development will be able to connect to it. This would often be confirmed as part of a resource consent application.

What the 2024 Watercare maps were showing was that development in a number of live zoned areas couldn’t be serviced by the existing public reticulated services, for water, wastewater or both. This then meant that developments couldn’t be serviced, in some cases for a number of years, and this created issues with resource consent applications.

What are the map updates?

With the aim of providing more information upfront, Watercare have this month updated their maps to make it clearer:

• where there is no capacity now,
• where there is no capacity in the long term,
• where there is limited capacity,
• where there is some capacity, but closer monitoring is being undertaken,
• where there is capacity.

You can find the maps here.

This is useful information, as it allows people developing land to know upfront if there are issues. You will still need to discuss these with your planning consultants and engineer to better understand how your residential development is affected.  We are still experiencing inconsistency with advice from Watercare, and the situation does create some risk for residential development.

Looking at developing your land?

With all these changes happening it’s important to use a skilled and experienced planning professional. With over 60 combined years of resource consenting experience, including over 35 years of processing resource consents for Councils, you can rely on our advice.

Contact us on hello@planningplus.co.nz or (09) 427 9966 to discuss your next project.