Fletcher, which is listed on both the ASX and the New Zealand stock exchanges, has been under a trading halt since Wednesday and its shares will begin trading again on Monday. Fletcher runs a $3 billion-plus business in Australia under brands including Tradelink plumbing and bathroom supplies, Laminex, Stramit roofing and structural steel, Iplex pipes, Oliveri sinkware and Fletcher insulation.
Mr Taylor said Fletcher had sent plumbing crews into 170 of the houses in Perth that reported leaks. It found installation methods were poor with pipes being bent at far greater angles than recommended, and had not complied with recommended practices for installation in walls and roofs.
Mr Taylor said the governance and standards for plumbing maintained by industry regulators in WA was not as stringent as in the eastern states of Australia.
“We have just seen the quality of plumbing installation erode over time [in WA],” he said.
He also said Fletcher had used external experts to give an independent view and test some of the patterns the company had detected in its early scrutiny.
“We didn’t want to drink our own Kool-Aid here,” he said.
BGC chief executive Daniel Cooper said on Friday it had expected Fletcher Building to deflect blame. “We refuse to accept that one day in 2017, all plumbers in Western Australia woke up and forgot how to plumb,” Mr Cooper said.
BGC said on Wednesday the cost of full remediation for houses where pipes had cracked was on average $60,000 per house. It said the pipes were bursting at the rate of 6.7 a day. BGC said until October 6 there had been 1118 homes it had constructed where pipes had burst.
It had built 11,817 homes since 2017 using the specific Iplex pipes in question and estimated the total cost of a full remediation to be $709 million. The home builder also said 99 per cent of the pipe bursts since 2017 had occurred after Fletcher changed to using a new type of resin in pipe manufacturing, from Korean-based Ylem.
Mr Taylor rejected suggestions a change in resin provider had been a factor and said Ylem, which is a major global player, had not experienced any issues similar to Perth anywhere else in the world.
Fletcher announced in April it would set aside $15 million for the faulty pipes issue. Mr Taylor said on Friday that 29 builders in WA had registered with the fund, and 383 repairs had been completed using $3 million of the $15 million.
Mr Taylor said the only reason that Fletcher had been in a trading halt was because of what he termed a BGC “stunt” in holding a briefing on Wednesday.
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