Brooke van Velden
ACT Housing Spokesperson
The Government needs to scrap its Healthy Homes rules and go back to the drawing board, including properly consulting experts and landlords.
Public Housing Minister Poto Williams has admitted that the Government’s Healthy Homes rules aren’t right but that landlords still have to comply with them.
I have spoken with a heating and ventilation expert who has said that the Government has got this completely wrong. That expert has estimated that the cost for the oversized heat pumps will be several hundred million dollars across more than 500,000 rental properties.
Private landlords are being told to meet standards the Government itself doesn’t have to comply with yet. On top of that, the Government is now saying it doesn’t think it’s got the rules right.
Officials and the sector have told Poto Williams there are ‘significant issues’ with the heating tool used to calculate how large heaters need to be. The heating tool is suggesting heaters that are larger than the homes actually need.
An oversized heat pump will mean higher and unnecessary costs for landlords and tenants, which could push rents up or mean that renters are less likely to actually use them.
These aren’t heathy homes standards, they’re double standards.
The Government has painted private landlords as villains. The reality is many landlords have had so many regulations and costs piled onto them by the Government, they’ve had no choice but to raise rents.
Now landlords who have done the right thing and complied may have done so unnecessarily.
ACT would radically overhaul infrastructure funding, through 30-year partnerships with central government for each region. We’d then replace the Resource Management Act with legislation designed to facilitate home building and get councils out of the building consent business.
Rather than dividing, the Government should be uniting New Zealanders behind good ideas.
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