Turner Judy: Affordable Housing: Enabling Territorial Authorities Bill — First Reading 
Turner Judy: Affordable Housing: Enabling Territorial Authorities Bill — First Reading 
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JUDY TURNER (Deputy Leader—United Future) 
: 
 I rise on behalf of United Future to speak to the first reading of the Affordable Housing: Enabling Territorial Authorities Bill. United Future will be supporting this first reading because affordable housing is an issue that we are passionate about. But I will signal at this first reading stage that we have some concerns. We are not sure that this legislation is the solution but it certainly is an opportunity to hear from the wider public particularly those with a vested interest in the housing industry. Over the last few years members from United Future have had some very interesting discussions around the issue of affordable housing. I remember very acutely some of the issues that came up at the affordable housing summit in Wellington that we attended. 
We are concerned that this bill is an opportunity wasted and that there could be more helpful things included in it. The bill enables but does not require territorial authorities to assess the level of affordable housing in their districts and following that assessment it allows a territorial authority to develop an affordable housing policy and to implement it. 
The bill says that the implementation of that policy includes enabling territorial authorities to require developers to facilitate the provision of affordable housing and it says in clause 12 that an affordable housing policy must state how territorial authorities might assist those developers who are facilitating the provision of affordable housing. Territorial authorities will be asked under clause 11(2) to consider in their policy development a requirement of a developer to include a proportion of affordable housing in a development. That is an area that concerns us because there will have to be some fairly good incentives in there for developers to factor that into their thinking. I guess a territorial authority could include in its own plan an intention to free up appropriate land specifically for affordable housing. This would mean that when people were purchasing land for development they would understand what the intention of the territorial authority was. We are a little bit concerned that people who have invested in land for development will then discover after the fact that they have all sorts of requirements slapped on them in a way that I think could be extremely “business unfriendly” and unfair. 
One of the things I am acutely aware of is a discussion I had with one of the leaders of the Registered Master Builders Federation who talked about the federation’s estimates around the issue of compliance costs. It figured allowing for reasonable and fair compliance on a residential property that New Zealand homeowners could save up to $30000 per average house if there were more sensible compliance regulations around housing. The fear being expressed at the time was that in the wake of the weathertight homes issue the industry had become so risk-averse that it had a level of compliance around the building of houses that was unreasonable and that added to the problem of making houses unaffordable for middle to low income New Zealanders. 
We recommend to the Government and to the committee that they look at some of the very fine work that has been done by the social policy unit of the Salvation Army which has some fantastic recommendations about the way we could be making greater progress on the issue of affordable housing. We are not completely convinced that this bill reflects the kinds of suggestions that the unit has thoughtfully put forward and that is of concern to us. [ 
Interruption 
] The Green member is quite right: there are some positive things in this bill. I am not trying to say that this bill is not worth the paper it is written on; I think there are some interesting and positive provisions. I guess our fear is that those provisions do not go far enough and that they have some heavy-handed ways of approaching affordable housing that penalise the wrong people and do little for the people who are in need of affordable housing. But we are very happy to support the bill’s first reading because this is a discussion that must be had. United Future wants to reassure the House that we are supporting this first reading.