Williams Poto: Residential Tenancies Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWilliams Poto: Residential Tenancies Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 08 December 2015. Volume:710;Page:8638. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]POTO WILLIAMS (Labour—Christchurch East): I want to say that the speed with which the National Government is actually tackling the catastrophe of housing could be called glacial much like the temperature in many of the State houses that many of our people occupy. When we look at some of the missed opportunities that this Government has not taken—the special housing areas which have netted us only hundreds not the many thousands of homes that we need; the 700 new builds for Housing New Zealand in Christchurch which were supposed to have been finished by December of this year and we are not even halfway through. It has taken it 2 years to build not even 350 homes. So the National Government is not on top of its game when it comes to looking at housing.But we have got to be grateful for the little that the Government is doing. As electorate MPs we all know the stories: the mouldy houses the condensation the poor insulation and how costly it is to heat—and that is with the State houses. Private landlords have not until this point been required to meet any standards whatsoever—very poor standards—so we know that we are starting from a really low base here. When we think about the Minister saying how well the Housing New Zealand stock for example has been repaired we know that in Christchurch in Canterbury the earthquake repairs have only just been completed. It has taken it 5 years—5 years where people have lived in damaged cold homes. That is how speedy this Government has been around its repair programme.I want to give you a scenario: a constituent of mine in the suburb of Richmond who called me out to view her home. She has three small children mould on the curtains mould on the wallpaper and mould on the windowsills and the ceilings. There was only one room that had a heater in it a heat pump in the lounge. That is where the family gathered. We stood in the kitchen and had a conversation and the condensation was coming out of our mouths and that was at lunchtime on a sunny afternoon when it was actually colder inside the house than it was outside the house. If that is the kind of temperature you get inside a house a Government-owned house on a sunny afternoon what is it like in the evenings and at night-time for those small children being put to bed with no heating—with no heating? How can a small child retain its body heat and retain its health and be expected to thrive in conditions like that?That story is repeated not hundreds of times but thousands of times across the country. We know that because the health statistics for our children living in rental accommodation are so poor. They are so poor where we know that decent homes could save this country in health costs alone an enormous amount. So why is the Government doing this now? Well I think public opinion has really forced its hand. It knows the public opinion is against it; it knows that these measures are small but that it needs to start on this journey. It certainly does not go far enough.We have got on 1 June 2016 the requirement for State-owned homes and community providers to have underfloor and ceiling insulation where that is possible and smoke alarms but we have got no standards of heating that are also required. Having insulation solves only half of the problem; we have to actually have adequate heating and cost-effective heating as well to heat homes particularly through the middle of the North Island and the South Island where it gets extraordinarily cold. We also know that private landlords will not be required to meet these standards until 2019. So the bulk of the homes—if we are talking about people renting there are 450000 households that rent and currently only 64000 Housing New Zealand homes—will not be required to meet any standard for 4 years. This Government should have been signalling to landlords from the start of its term if it was so concerned about the state of the rental market that this is what it wanted to do; that it was so concerned about tenants in this country that it wanted to ensure that there were some standards for insulation. But that has not been the case.So we are going to require smoke alarms to be installed. I have not seen any information and I am sure that during the course of this bill’s passage through the select committee process people will be asking questions about what types of smoke alarms we are going to install. Having a smoke alarm installed is no good if there are no batteries in it if it is not tested or if it is not functioning. It would be really interesting to know how many fires have occurred in New Zealand where there was a smoke alarm but the fact that it was not functioning meant it was just a piece of decoration on the ceiling.Community Housing Aotearoa’s Scott Figenshow said that insulation is half the answer but how do we heat the home? It is a very very important question. The cost of some heat pumps for example: if we are talking about private landlords the cost to install good quality heat pumps is somewhere in the region of about $5000. That is not a huge amount of money when we think about how much rental income a property can actually generate over the life of its use as a rental property. Technically it should be a small investment for the landlord but we know that some homeowners are not even considering putting properties into the rental pool because they are making so much money just through house price inflation. In some cases where properties are selling in less than 30 days why would you even consider having tenants in your home when you can turn over properties that quickly and make quite a tidy sum? So how are we going to incentivise these landlords to meet these standards when actually they are not going to? They are going to look at the bare minimum as they do currently already despite the fact that there are queues of families desperate for homes.If we look at the assessment process that has been implemented through the Ministry of Social Development where the actual assessment of tenancies for State and community housing has been taken out of the hands of Housing New Zealand Corporation—the people who actually knew housing and who had relationships with tenants—can we say that that assessment process has actually made it easier for families to get into decent quality homes? Well the case that happened on the weekend where the mother was in the cockroach-infested caravan park cabin obviously shows that no that is not the case because prior to that story hitting the newspaper and hitting the media she was not assessed as being high priority. As soon as that case hit the media her reassessment was done and lo and behold she went to the top of the list. So there is something wrong with this process.I just want to comment on what has become a dreadful phenomenon in the Canterbury region and those are the “as is where is” homes where people have taken their cash settlement and decided not to repair their home. They have buggered off and bought a home somewhere else and they have left that house to become a rental—a damaged house left to become a rental. It is well-known particularly in my electorate that people are living in homes that are structurally unsound because the homeowners have taken the cash and fled. I can see Matt Doocey thinking very carefully over there. You know of some examples I am sure Mr Doocey in your electorate.There are some major problems with this bill and I just want to in conclusion go over those. There is no standard being set for heating. There is a 4-year transition period for the bulk of the homes which are privately owned by private landlords and we know that in that time there will be many children who will continue to be hospitalised due to the poor quality of these homes. There is no provision of standards for mould or ventilation in this bill and then there is this massive loophole that sees insulation standards for 1978 being the standard to be met when we know that the current standard from the 2004 Building Act is far more appropriate. Thank you.