00:00Plumber Luke Morfurt is getting his hands dirty at a house in West Hobart.
00:08Final approval for this renovation has been held up for two years
00:12by an ongoing dispute with Hobart City Council's Plumbing Department.
00:16It's the plumbing inspectors when you actually get to site,
00:20they're the biggest challenge for us.
00:23The delay has cost the owner thousands of dollars.
00:26We do charge more purely because of how onerous Hobart City Council can be.
00:33If they make it take longer for us to do the job, we have to charge more.
00:38Hobart City Councillor Louise Elliott has tapped into the building industry's frustration
00:43by launching a survey on her Facebook page which had dozens of responses within days,
00:48expressing particular frustration with the council's plumbing department.
00:53The results have actually been really concerning for me.
00:55She says some respondents have told her they're adding hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars
01:01to their quotes to account for delays.
01:03There seems to be what I'm describing as a pain tax,
01:06where a lot of people are actually charging more,
01:09plumbers are charging more especially, for doing work in Hobart.
01:12The Master Plumbers Association of Tasmania told the ABC
01:16that some plumbers won't work in Hobart Municipality and some plumbers do increase their prices
01:22to cover the extra cost and delay associated with working with Hobart Council.
01:28Internal documents seen by the ABC also confirm that there have been backlogs in the plumbing department,
01:35something acknowledged by the council.
01:37Seven months ago we identified that we need to provide some more resourcing into this space,
01:41so there is a skills shortage in terms of plumbing inspectors at the moment across Tasmania.
01:46The council says it's working to resolve the issues in consultation with the industry
01:51and has recently employed a new plumbing inspector to boost the team's capacity.
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