Twyford Phil: Healthy Homes Guarantee Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeTwyford Phil: Healthy Homes Guarantee Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 18 March 2015. Volume:704;Page:2412. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]PHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatū): I move That the Healthy Homes Guarantee Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Social Services Committee to consider the bill. I want to make three points in this contribution. The first is that we have a major problem in New Zealand with cold damp homes and it is causing our children in this country to be hospitalised at Third World rates for infectious and respiratory diseases. The second point I want to make is that current approaches are simply not working and the problem of cold damp unhealthy homes and the public health impact that they have on our people is not being helped by current policies and regulations. The third point is that I want to talk about my bill and what it would do to solve this problem. If I have time I would also like to address some of the objections and criticisms that have been levelled at my bill over the last year or so.I want to start by quoting Professor Philippa Howden-Chapman of Otago University. Professor Howden-Chapman is the winner of this year’s Prime Minister’s Science Prize. She said that houses “get damp and cold and mouldy but it also damages the people living in them particularly babies children and older people. It damages their lungs. If they have heart problems it is harder for their circulatory system to work. And so people who live in cold houses it’s likely to aggravate their heart conditions but for children we get this terrible terrible battery of respiratory infections and close contact infections because people have to crowd together in one room. So it’s pretty shocking in a country that is as wealthy as we are; we can’t make our houses warm enough for people to live in.” That I think is a very good summary by Professor Philippa Howden-Chapman of the problem that we are trying to deal with here.I now want to quote from a story that ran in the Nelson Mail last year. It told a story of a family—Jared Haruru and his partner Grace Rāpata—who live in Victory in Nelson. They have got three children under 4 years. Both parents are working earning the minimum wage. They told the Nelson Mail that keeping their house warm in winter is a huge problem. All three children they said have asthma so keeping them warm is crucial to their health. They said: “It’s a damp house. In the winter we all sleep in the same room because it’s too cold. Or we sleep in the lounge with the heat pump on but the heat pump is not a cheap thing to run. … We have to wipe down the house all the time for mould because it’s quite damp.” That is a story that has been played out in every town city and neighbourhood around New Zealand. There are people particularly kids and the elderly getting sick unnecessarily because of cold damp homes.In fact the problem is so bad that a few years ago the Child Poverty Monitor estimated that in New Zealand we are hospitalising 40000 young children every year for poverty-related diseases. That is 40000 kids every year in hospital for preventable diseases and many of those diseases are related to cold damp homes. I think everybody knows that the quality of New Zealand’s housing stock is very poor. The Building Research Association of New Zealand the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority and other Government agencies have made it very clear. In a 2010 survey the Building Research Association of New Zealand found that 22 percent—only 22 percent—of rental properties were in a good condition but that twice as many were in a poor condition.The students at the Wellington medical school did a study a few years ago. They interviewed the families of 150 acutely ill children who were admitted to Wellington Regional Hospital during 2 weeks in winter in 2012. What they found was that the prevalence of exposure to cold damp and overcrowded houses was striking in all of those families where kids had been admitted to hospital—34 percent a full third of the admissions were for respiratory diseases associated with the cold and damp. That is the problem but the solutions that this Government has in place are not working. There has been a generous subsidy scheme in place to encourage people to insulate their homes. Going back to the last Labour Government and to give credit to the current Government and the Green Party those policies have continued on for a number of years.More than a quarter of a million houses have been insulated with the help of those taxpayer subsidies. But the striking thing is that a tiny proportion of those houses that have been insulated were private. Only 14 percent of all of those insulated houses were private rentals. Only 5 percent of private rental houses in this country have been insulated according to the best statistics we have so it is very clear that private landlords have had no economic incentive to take advantage of those subsidies. What we do know is that half the children in this country who are growing up below the poverty line are living in private rentals. The very poorest people are living in private rentals. Those kids are growing up in cold damp homes they are getting sick unnecessarily and that is locking them into a cycle of disadvantage. To make that worse National drastically cut the subsidy—it cut the subsidy back by two-thirds. Treasury told it that actually the current funding for that subsidy is enough to insulate only one in six of the houses that are in need of it.The other initiative or policy of this Government that falls well short of what is needed in this area is the trial warrants of fitness for State houses that Nick Smith announced a couple of years ago. We do not need warrants of fitness for State houses. If the Minister Paula Bennett wants State houses to be insulated and retrofitted with modern heating she only needs to pick up the phone and tell the chief executive of Housing New Zealand to do that. We need warrants of fitness or minimum standards for private rentals across the whole market.My bill offers a simple practical affordable and pragmatic solution to this problem and I urge members to vote for it tonight. What it will do is direct the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority to set standards for insulation and heating. It will require landlords every time they post a new tenancy agreement to make a declaration that they meet those standards. There is no big heavy compliance mechanism involved—it is simple it will do the trick and it will make sure that every rental property in this country is warm and dry. And that is what we want to achieve.There are three reasons to consider voting for this bill this evening. The first is that it is the right thing to do. We cannot go on in this country hospitalising our children for Third World diseases because our homes are too cold and damp. Secondly it is a practical solution. I want to quote Andrew King from the New Zealand Property Investors Federation who said that my healthy homes bill is sensible and pragmatic. This is the head of the landlords’ federation the Property Investors Federation of New Zealand who said that this bill that we are debating tonight is a sensible and pragmatic solution that it tackles the two biggest problems—the cold and the damp—and that it should not incur large compliance costs. Thirdly it makes good economic sense. What we know is that—and this is based on highly credible New Zealand - based public health research—for every dollar invested in retrofitting our homes with insulation and efficient heating we save $5 in public health expenditure. That is a no-brainer. This bill makes sound economic sense.My final point is that we do not allow cars on the road if they do not have a decent warrant of fitness—if they are not safe and fit for purpose. We do not allow a restaurant to operate unless it has a permit to say that it is hygienic and that it meets all the necessary standards for food preparation and food hygiene. But somehow in New Zealand today in the 21st century it is OK for landlords to rent out homes that are a threat to the health of the people living in them and I do not believe that that is acceptable any more. I say that publicly this argument has already been won. The public is behind this bill. They want to see a warrant of fitness implemented. They want to see minimum standards that make our homes healthy. They do not want to see our kids hospitalised in the numbers that they are because of cold damp homes. It is time for this bill to be passed.