Policing rental housing code with 15 staff ‘a joke’

Just 15 officers are responsible for enforcing standards across the New Zealand rental market.

Building and Construction Minister Nick Smith said the number was sufficient to meet the ‘‘high risk’’ section of the market – like the squalid and overcrowded Auckland boarding houses making headlines recently.

The investigation and compliance unit, part of the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment (MBIE), was launched last year.

‘‘It has about 15 people but it started from zero,’’ Smith said.

He said the 15 officers were enough to cover the private rental market of about 450,000 properties, as most tenancy issues were taken to the tenancy tribunal by renters themselves.

‘‘The compliance and investigation unit focuses on the properties of the more vulnerable tenants, where they are unlikely to be able to take a case to the tenancy tribunal.’’

He noted that local councils could close unsafe rental housing.

Labour MP Phil Twyford, who had just finished grilling Smith about housing at a select committee hearing, said the number of officers was ridiculously low.

‘‘It’s a joke. It’s a drop in the bucket. It’s pathetic. There are hundreds if not thousands of boarding houses in Auckland alone and there is just no proper oversight or investigation,’’ Twyford said.

He said Labour would set up a licensing scheme where boarding houses would have to register before operation.

A clear minimum standard would be set by MBIE and enforced by local councils.

Smith said a positive licensing scheme would be unnecessarily burdensome and complicated, as there was no clear definition of what a ‘‘boarding house’’ was.

He faced a flood of criticism and queries from Twyford at the social services select committee yesterday.

Twyford said the Government was refusing to properly assess the problem, let alone solve it.

The two went back and fourth on which estimate the Government should trust, with Twyford advocating for the Auckland Council’s estimate that there is between 20,000 and 30,000 fewer houses than needed.

Smith said there were deficiencies with that number and the best way to measure housing supply problems was with price – which had flat-lined in Auckland for months.

He noted that there had been six years of growth in residential construction, the longest consecutive amount on record.

Government construction of homes in 2016 was the highest in 20 years.