Proposal 6: Changes to fees and charges for motor vehicle certifier activities

Summary of Proposal 6

New Zealand has over 3,000 motor vehicle certifiers, 4.7 million vehicles subject to Warrants of Fitness (WoF) and 500,000 vehicles subject to Certificates of Fitness (CoF).

Waka Kotahi allows over 8,000 vehicle inspectors and more than 3,000 inspecting organisations to act as regulators on our behalf. Certifiers play an important role in ensuring the safety of New Zealand’s private and commercial vehicles.

We appoint, monitor and evaluate the performance of these organisations to make sure they effectively carry out their regulatory responsibilities. We also support our agents to improve their regulatory performance.

Why are we proposing these changes?

Certifiers perform a critical safety function, and there are limited numbers of them, particularly heavy vehicle specialist certifiers.

Removing application fees for entry into the system reduces the barrier to people becoming certifiers, and should help the industry grow.

Vehicle certification was the area where regulatory failure occurred, and Waka Kotahi had to take immediate action (using government loans) to rectify 850 non-compliant vehicles identified after the failure. This area hadn’t been properly regulated and monitored, and significant investment was needed (and continues to be needed) to improve our capacity and capability to work with, regulate, and monitor this group.

The current fees and charges were set several years ago and don’t reflect the current cost to regulate and provide services to certifiers. We’re proposing these changes to make sure revenue from certifiers covers the costs of improving regulation and monitoring in this area.

Our monitoring and auditing of certifiers will reduce the risk of unsafe motor vehicles being driven on our roads.

How would we collect these charges?

• In-service certifiers group (WoF) – charge would be collected in the cost of a WoF sticker (excludes the cost of producing the sticker).
• In-service certifiers group (CoF) – charge would be collected in the cost of a CoF sticker (excludes the cost of producing the sticker).
• Border inspectors group – inspectors would be invoiced monthly based on the number of records entered into the Border Inspection System that month.
• Entry certifiers group – charge would be collected in the cost of LT4085U, LT4085N forms, or when a record is entered using VINDirect (excludes the cost of producing the form).
• Specialist heavy vehicle certifiers group – charge would be collected in the cost of heavy vehicle form (excludes the cost of producing the form).
• Specialist low volume vehicle certifiers group – charge would be collected in the cost of low volume vehicle tag plate (excludes the cost of producing the plate).
• Repair certifiers group – charge would be collected in the cost of repair form (LT 308) and the no repair certification required declaration (LT 307) (excludes the cost of producing the form).

How and when would changes take place?

Changes would be introduced through new regulations, or amendments to Land Transport (Certification and Other Fees) Regulations 2014, with effect on or before October 2023.

Tables – Charges affected by Proposal 6

There are 13 charges in this section. They are summarised in the table below.

Proposed fees and charges in the following tables assume that additional government funding is secured through the use of section 9(1A) of the Land Transport Management Act 2003 (outlined in Proposal 1). You will notice a column showing the estimated impact if s9(1A) is unsuccessful.

Table 16: Proposed fees that will be replaced (updated 26 April 2022)

Table 17: Proposed fees that go up and change to a charge for various motor vehicle certifier groups (GST inclusive) (updated 26 April 2022)

Table 18: Proposed fee that changes to a charge and goes down - In-service motor vehicle certifiers group (GST inclusive) (updated 26 April 2022)