Twyford PhilIn CommitteePart 1 Amendments to Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Act 2013PHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatū): It is great to be taking part in this Committee stage debate on the Housing Legislation Amendment Bill. I want to address one of the major concerns that we have on this side of the House with not only this bill but the whole special housing areas policy and that is the very weak affordability requirements that are at the heart of this policy.I want to address my comments to a couple of Supplementary Order Papers that are on the Table. The first is in the name of Metiria Turei and the second is in my name and both of them make a proposal about how affordability requirements could be better incorporated into the housing accords and special housing areas legislation. But I think it is important to understand the context of this and the context is a debate that we have been having in this Parliament for some time really about the best way to deliver affordability.The Minister's view if I may characterise it—and I invite him to take a call on this and put me straight if he wants to—is that the only real way to deliver sustained improvements in affordability is by increasing the supply of dwellings in the market and in an innocent fifth-form economics textbook kind of way he rejects the idea that actually building homes that are affordable might help. He considers that to be I think an unnecessary distraction and really the focus should be on increasing supply. There is an irony that members will have noticed which is that a Minister who places such great store on increasing the supply of houses has so signally failed to do that during his time as housing Minister but what we have seen as the accords and special housing areas have been rolled out is that with the first one the accord with Auckland Council there was quite a lot of debate about whether there should be in fact the ability of the council to require that special housing areas should have to deliver a percentage of affordable housing.There was some pressure on the Minister I think from within the Parliament and some pressure from Auckland Council and at the last minute he conceded—I think it was possibly in the Committee stage or at the select committee—that yes the Auckland Council under that accord would have the ability to require that 10 percent of homes in special housing areas be affordable. We have always taken the view that that is extremely modest—in fact far too modest—because the market on its own is delivering about 5 percent of new dwellings in the so-called affordable range. Students of history will know that only 30 to 35 years ago actually the market was delivering about a third of all new dwellings in the affordable range and that is one of the really crucial indicators of how badly out of whack the housing market has become because so few houses are affordable—about 5 percent. So anyway that was the situation with Auckland Council.In some of the other accords—and I am thinking particularly of Tauranga—the mayor and council officials directly asked the Minister to insert affordability quotas into their accord so they could require that a certain number of homes in their special housing areas be affordable. The Minister point-blank refused. He and his officials said: We're not interested in that. We're only interested in increasing the supply of homes. We're not interested in requiring developers to provide a share of new dwellings that are affordable."What we know—and this completely kind of busts out of the fifth-form economics textbook from which the Minister's thinking is derived—Clare Curran: Year 10.PHIL TWYFORD: —year 10; thank you—is that in an overheated undersupplied market developers will always choose to build more expensive dwellings because that is where they make bigger profit margins and that is the story of Auckland in the last 10 years. If you look at the apartments that are being built in Auckland at the moment 99 percent of them are at the luxury end of the market. Very very few of them are affordable. If the market was in perfect balance and if it was a perfectly functioning market yes the market would—"