Consent, PS1 and shade structures: what actually gets asked for

The starting position

Under the Building Act, building work needs a consent unless it is specifically exempt. Some small, low-risk structures are exempt by virtue of what they are and how big they are — that is the mechanism people are relying on when they say you do not need consent for a small one.

Two things catch people out. First, the exemptions are narrower than the folklore suggests, and being exempt from consent does not exempt you from meeting the Building Code — the work still has to be done properly. Second, commercial and public buildings are treated differently from a private home, and a structure over a public or workplace area is very often consentable regardless of size.

We will confirm where your specific job sits before quoting, because it changes both the price and the timeline.

What tips a job into needing consent

• Size — most exemptions are bounded by floor area
• Whether it is attached to an existing building, and what it is fixed to
• Whether people gather underneath it, and whether the site is public or a workplace
• Proximity to boundaries, and whether it affects egress or fire separation
• Whether it is permanent, or genuinely temporary and demountable

A freestanding sail over a private back lawn and an identical-looking sail over a school playground are not the same regulatory problem, even at the same size.

What a PS1 actually is

A producer statement is a professional's written statement to the council that part of the work meets the Building Code. PS1 is the design one — issued by a chartered professional engineer, covering the structural design of the thing being built.

There are others in the family: PS2 is design review, PS3 is construction (issued by the builder or installer confirming they built it as designed), and PS4 is construction review. For an engineered shade structure, PS1 and PS3 are the two that usually matter.

Councils are not obliged to accept producer statements, but in practice a PS1 from a recognised engineer is what lets a consent officer sign off a structure they cannot reasonably assess themselves.

Why it is usually the bottleneck

For a school board or a commercial client, the shade structure is not the hard part — the approval is. A project stalls when a supplier quotes a structure, the council asks for engineering, and nobody has it. Weeks disappear finding an engineer who will take the job and produce a statement for someone else's design.

This is the practical reason we lead with engineered systems for institutional work. Where a structure is designed as a system, the engineering exists already and the producer statement is a document rather than a project.

What we would suggest asking any supplier

• Will this design need consent on my site, and who is applying for it?
• Can you provide a PS1, and is it included in the price or extra?
• Who provides the PS3 when it is installed?
• If council comes back with questions, who answers them?
• What happens to the timeline if consent takes longer than expected?

If a quote is materially cheaper than the others, these questions usually explain why.

Where we sit

We will tell you at the quote whether we think your job needs consent, and we can supply producer statements for engineered structures. We are not a consenting authority and we will not promise you an outcome your council has not given — but we will not quote you a structure and leave the paperwork as your problem either.