Walker Holly: Social Housing Reform (Housing Restructuring and Tenancy Matters Amendment) Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWalker Holly: Social Housing Reform (Housing Restructuring and Tenancy Matters Amendment) Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 16 May 2013. Volume:690;Page:10100. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]HOLLY WALKER (Green): As we have heard from both sides of the House so far this bill the Social Housing Reform (Housing Restructuring and Tenancy Matters Amendment) Bill represents a major overhaul of social housing in New Zealand and its significance should not be underestimated. It does signal overtly what has been clear for some time which is that the Government wants out of social housing. It wants Housing New Zealand to operate only as a landlord effectively and not as a social agency. Housing New Zealand’s 69000 properties are the second-largest single asset on the Government books. The Government clearly wants to treat them as such as a commercial asset not as an essential social service. That much is clear from the Cabinet agreements from 29 October last year which are revealed in the regulatory impact—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Order! I am sorry to interrupt the member. There cannot be interjections when people are standing.HOLLY WALKER: Thank you. That much is clear from the regulatory impact statement’s Cabinet agreements which read like a neo-liberal manifesto. This Government’s vision for social housing has “a shifted emphasis from a model whereby the Government provides social housing primarily through ownership to one where it purchases services and enables greater consumer choice and diversity through a contestable funding pool; a larger percentage of social housing delivered by non-government providers; a less dominant role for [Housing New Zealand] one where non-government social housing providers enter the market and/or existing providers expand their operations and [Housing New Zealand] makes more efficient use of capital.” That is the vision.How does the bill give effect to this wonderful new neo-liberal corporate version of social housing? Well it provides for renewable tenancies for all Housing New Zealand tenants it shifts housing needs - assessments from Housing New Zealand to the Ministry of Social Development it extends the income-related rent subsidy to community housing providers and it provides a framework for a very limited warrant of fitness for some rental properties. There is a very small amount of good news in this bill and that is the extension of the income-related rent subsidy to the community housing sector.But there are some incredibly damaging measures in this bill as well and the worst of those is the extension of renewable tenancies to all Housing New Zealand tenants. In July 2011 renewable tenancies were introduced for new Housing New Zealand tenants. That has been in place for not even 2 years. We have barely seen any tenancies renewed under the pilot scheme of renewable tenancies which is now being extended to all tenants. So with barely any reviews undertaken the Government is going to roll them out to everyone even though it has not had the opportunity to actually test them to see how they work in practice to analyse the data and to review what the outcomes are for the tenants who have been moved out of Housing New Zealand homes because it has not had time to implement the pilot policy yet. The Government is already rolling it out to everybody in Housing New Zealand properties. It does not make any sense. Renewable tenancies are very dangerous because many of the social harms associated with poor-quality unaffordable housing are associated with the high degree of churn experienced by tenants in the private rental market. That is things like children changing schools frequently. It is things like social dislocation and isolation experienced by families who move frequently and who are unable to put down roots in their community. It is things like the inability to be part of their community and participate fully because they are constantly moving around. That is very common in the private rental market and that is what we are going to see now in the social housing market because of the extension of renewable tenancies to all tenants in Housing New Zealand and social housing properties.At the moment if Housing New Zealand tenants are able to get into a Housing New Zealand home they get a blessed relief from this dislocation of the private rental market because finally after years of that dislocation and severe housing stress and often homelessness they actually have a place to call home where they can put down roots where they can become part of the community and where their children can go to the same school for a number of years and they can begin to rebuild their lives. That is one of the beauties of the Housing New Zealand and State housing system. And perversely enough for the outcomes of this bill the ability for tenants to participate fully in their education and their community and to develop social connections dramatically improves the chances that they will be able to recover and move into private housing or purchase their own house under their own steam. So Housing New Zealand’s existing policy actually makes it more likely that those tenants are going to be able to recover and move on. Extending renewable tenancies will affect many people before they are ready to do that and it is likely to contribute to a higher level of churn in the social housing market as well as in the private housing market.The other concern we have about extending renewable tenancies is that it is going to affect a high number of elderly and disabled tenants who have been in their Housing New Zealand homes for a long time and for whom being moved on will be incredibly disruptive and harmful. The Minister has told us that he is budgeting to evict 1000 tenants or households in the first year of this policy being in place and 2000 in the second—so that is 3000 evictions as we heard before in the middle of a housing affordability crisis. In the Green Party we say that he should build 3000 new houses to accommodate this demand and he should give those tenants—because he will talk about tenants in Housing New Zealand homes who are already paying market rents and therefore do not need to be there—the opportunity to purchase equity in their Housing New Zealand houses. If they are able to pay market rents then that money that they can afford to pay should go towards purchasing equity in these houses so that not only do they have the opportunity to get on to the homeownership ladder but also we increase the supply of affordable housing by continuing to build new Housing New Zealand properties to replace them.The second concerning element of the bill is the shift from Housing New Zealand to the Ministry of Social Development of the responsibilities of needs-assessment for tenants. Again it signals that Housing New Zealand and the Minister want out of service provision in the housing sector. Arguably I think in some ways this could be seen as an improvement because Housing New Zealand has been so terrible at doing these needs-assessments since the introduction of the 0800 number. There is indeed some rationale to have eligibility assessed by the same agency that assesses eligibility for the accommodation supplement so there is some potential with this idea. The problem is that what we know about Work and Income New Zealand and the Ministry of Social Development and their attitude towards dealing with clients is that they have a strong incentive not to tell people about their full eligibility and entitlements for support. They have a strong incentive to move people off welfare and not to put them on to the support that they could be eligible for. And we have got no confidence that they would be any better at applying that process to housing needs - assessment and making sure that people were accessing their full entitlement to the accommodation supplement or making sure that they were getting into an income - related rent subsidy house. So we are not convinced that the Ministry of Social Development is actually capable of doing that in a way that potentially might have some benefit.There is also a risk in moving this needs-assessment away from Housing New Zealand that the agency making decisions about what houses to build and where—Housing New Zealand—will no longer be informed in making those decisions by the knowledge that it gleans by being the one that does the assessment of those needs. So there is a separation there.Extending the income-related rent subsidy to community housing providers is as I said one part of the bill that we do support in the Green Party because we agree that the community housing sector generally delivers high-quality housing that is specifically suited to the needs of its tenants. We could support that but that on its own is not enough for us to support this legislation. We would note that as well as extending the income-related rent subsidy there is a very real need for the Government to fund some capacity-building in the community housing sector—that if it wants the community housing sector to pick up the slack where it does not want Housing New Zealand to provide service any more it has to build capacity in the sector to allow that to happen.Finally I note the rental warrant of fitness. If there is one reform that we urgently need in the housing sector it is a warrant of fitness for rental housing. But what we havegot is a damp squib. We have got a very limited warrant of fitness which applies to only Housing New Zealand houses initially and later perhaps to the community housing organisations. Focusing this on Housing New Zealand is a waste of time and it is a red herring because I have received through an Official Information Act request Housing New Zealand maintenance guidelines and I have got a book this thick of the guidelines that Housing New Zealand already has for the quality of its houses. The problem is not that it does not have robust standards at Housing New Zealand; it is that it does not implement or maintain its properties up to those standards and it does not respond on time when tenants make complaints. A warrant of fitness will not make a blind bit of difference to that. Most children growing up in poverty in poor quality homes do not live in Housing New Zealand properties; they live in private rental houses and this bill does nothing for them. The Greens will be thoroughly opposing this bill for all of those reasons.