Twyford Phil: Weathertight Homes Resolution Services Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeTwyford Phil: Weathertight Homes Resolution Services Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 10 March 2015. Volume:703;Page:2074. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]PHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatū): Before I make some specific comments about this Weathertight Homes Resolution Services Amendment Bill I just want to respond to one or two things that the member Matt Doocey said in his contribution. He gave us a very interesting if somewhat ponderous journey through a number of different housing issues. I could not help but notice one or two things that Matt Doocey said. He made the rather startling claim that the National Party is the party of homeownership which will come as something of a surprise to many New Zealanders who for the last 6 years have watched this Government sit on its hands while house prices in our two largest cities have gone through the roof. Homeownership rates are plummeting and this Government does nothing about it. The Reserve Bank says it is not doing enough and it should do more. Harcourts—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Order! This is about weathertightness.PHIL TWYFORD: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): No no. I have ruled.PHIL TWYFORD: OK. Well I just want to say following on from the previous member’s lengthy disquisition on his baking exploits in Canterbury that at least I am talking about housing issues. I am responding directly to outrageous claims that were made by the member who spoke previously that the National Party is the party of homeownership because clearly it is not the party of homeownership. In that member’s city this Government has presided over the snail’s pace residential rebuild which has caused rents to go through the roof in the very communities where that member lives and that is a disgrace. That he can stand up and claim to be in the party of homeownership when his party has presided over plummeting homeownership rates shows an audacity that I admire.Matt Doocey also talked at some length about the problems faced by the young and vulnerable in cold damp homes. Well he is right—big problems. One-third of New Zealanders live in private rental accommodation and by and large those houses are not insulated and we are hospitalising far too many young people in this country with chest infections and respiratory and infectious diseases because those homes are cold and damp and yet that member’s party does nothing about it. It refuses to take notice of the ground-breaking public health research we have in this country that makes the connection between cold damp homes and kids being hospitalised. What is needed are guaranteed minimum standards that would require that private rental properties be insulated and have a heating source but what does Matt Doocey’s party in Government do about it? Sweet FA.Hon Members: Oh!PHIL TWYFORD: They bake scones—they bake scones.The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Order! That is not a parliamentary term that is acceptable. I will ask the member to withdraw that phrase.PHIL TWYFORD: I withdraw that. That party on that side of the House does very little at all to address the problem of unhealthy housing. All it has done is implement a pathetic little pilot scheme in a few hundred State houses and it does nothing about thousands and thousands of private rental properties where kids are being hospitalised because they are living in cold damp homes. So it shows either an ignorance of his own party’s policies or an extraordinary audacity for that member to get up in the House and pretend sympathy for the many young people who are growing up in cold damp homes and getting sick because of it.I wanted to really just underline my colleague’s comments that Labour is supporting this Weathertight Homes Resolution Services Amendment Bill to the select committee. What does it do? It clarifies some of the provisions—let us say the drafting errors—in the bill that was originally passed in order to help the weathertight funding assistance package to work better and goodness knows the weathertight funding assistance package needs to work better. What will the bill do? It will actually benefit about 70 homeowners—seven-zero. Seventy homeowners will benefit from this bill by the clarification of the eligibility criteria and the tweaks that this bill makes. It is a very modest very minor bill. It does very little to improve the situation of leaky home owners.I want to point that out in the context of the fact that the National Government promised a lot on this issue. When Maurice Williamson was the building and construction Minister he promised a great deal about fixing the problem with leaky homes. In 2010 he announced the burden-sharing agreement that would see the Government contributing 25 percent of the repair costs if councils contributed 25 percent of the repair costs and the homeowners contributed 50 percent and—and—promised to forgo their right to sue their right to legal action. Maurice Williamson was all over the news with this. He was all over the headlines and he announced and John Key announced that National was putting aside $1 billion—$1 billion—to help fund the repairs of leaky homes. Well it promised a lot but it has delivered very little. In July 2009 PricewaterhouseCoopers estimated that between 22000 and 89000 homes were affected with a forecast of 42000 dwellings that were likely to be leaky homes. That is the scale of the problem. Maurice Williamson said he was going to solve the problem and the Government was going to spend $1 billion helping the owners of leaky homes—$1 billion they promised.Well what actually happened here? In 2012 a year after Maurice Williamson trumpeted this new billion-dollar scheme to bail out leaky home owners Tim Rainey of Rainey Law one of the legal firms that has spent a lot of time working for leaky home owners asked the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment how many payouts had been made. In the year and 3 months after the scheme this billion-dollar scheme came into effect only 1232 leaky home owners had lodged expressions of interest only 186 homeowner agreements had been finalised and only 12 homeowners had received their final payments. Mr Rainey and John Gray of the Home Owners and Buyers Association—HOBANZ—criticised the scheme’s excessive bureaucracy long delays and difficulty getting repair jobs approved and money paid saying that although the Government scheme sounded good in theory it actually did not work in practice.So let us fast forward to 2013 when the Government had paid out only $8 million of the $1 billion that it promised. So $8 million was paid out 2 years after Maurice Williamson trumpeted his billion-dollar scheme. You know Auckland Council announced last year that it had spent $22 million on lawyers and consultants trying to deal with its share of the leaky homes problem. So one council has spent more than twice what this Government has paid out under the funding assistance package when it promised a billion-dollar bailout scheme. National has promised a great deal on this issue but it has actually delivered very very little.I want to talk just briefly about a case just outside my electorate in west Auckland. There is a building that stands really as a monument to the whole leaky homes fiasco. It is called Pepperwood Mews. It was a development initiated by Housing New Zealand. It did a deal with a shonky developer to build a whole lot of apartments. The apartments were sold by the developer under this agreement to a whole lot of hard-working Kiwi first home owners. That building now stands blighted graffiti covered and partially demolished while the homeowners—the leaky home owners—try to get their money back from Housing New Zealand through the courts. That is a fitting memorial to this whole leaky homes disaster.