Roche Denise: Residential Tenancies Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRoche Denise: Residential Tenancies Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 24 May 2016. Volume:714;Page:11132. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DENISE ROCHE (Green): I rise to take a short call on this. I want to address the Supplementary Order Paper that my colleague Metiria Turei has put forward. But before I do that I just want to make a couple of general comments. I think I will start by saying that essentially what we have got in New Zealand is housing stock rental accommodation that is substandard. How do we know that? We know that because there are according to the Children’s Commissioner 42000 hospital visits per year with 15 children dying every year because of substandard housing with poor insulation. We know that because we have seen so many people who are desperate for housing who are living in sheds who are living in garages and who are living in caravans and even in cars. I blame this Government because it has not addressed the housing crisis that has enabled bad landlords to continue to provide poor rental accommodation. It is about time that we did something about it.The Minister said earlier that we do have regulations. But they are being flouted. There are so many different examples of people who are living in substandard housing where if there are regulations their landlords are not meeting them anyway. I have examples of that in my own community where I have some friends who essentially were renting a house in which in the end they basically could not turn on the electricity because the wiring was so poor let alone heat the home in the middle of winter. When they asked for that to be fixed it just did not happen and so they moved out. But the landlord put that property on the market and another desperate family moved in with no repairs being undertaken whatsoever.I want to refer to some of the submissions that came through that support the measures that my colleague Metiria Turei has put in the Supplementary Order Paper. These were particularly from the Citizens Advice Bureau that said that it has had a 40 percent increase in inquiries related to residential tenancies in the last 5 years. I believe that reflects the fact that there is a wide breach of minimum standards from landlords and it is probably why the bureau supports more regulation for the protection of tenants. That is what we should be aiming at. We should be remembering that a home when it is rented is a home; it is not just a rental property and not just a way for the landlord to make money. If we focus on that then we should be focusing on the rights of tenants as well: the right to warm safe dry affordable housing is the first point but the second point is around security of tenancy. This is why we have in the Supplementary Order Paper a right of renewal for tenants after 3 years.I grew up in rental accommodation provided by the State through the railways. About 10 or 11 years of my life was spent in one rental property. That enabled me to go to one school to have one community that I was part of and to be very very stable. We have seen through various reports the declining education outcomes from children who are shifting from house to house to house because their rental properties are not secure and who have to move because they are facing rent increases. That is another reason why we want rights for tenants that include that any increases in rent need to be part of the rental agreement at the beginning. And it has to be justified so that we do not have families who are facing major rental increases are unable to budget and are having to shift into cheaper accommodation—and upsetting interfering and interrupting the education of their children.When you move into a home it is a home and that means that you are part of a community—that is where the schools are—