Enforcing the law

ON July 1 last year, a team of 15 housing inspectors set out to enforce standards across New Zealand’s estimated 450,000 rental properties.

It was an acknowledgement of what had been clear for many years: many New Zealand rentals, and the landlords who owned them, were not meeting legal standards.

Labour criticised the number of inspectors as inadequate, but Construction Minister Nick Smith told Parliament in July that: ‘‘This Government proudly introduced the compliance and investigation unit. There are over 400 cases of prosecutions before the Tenancy Tribunal as a consequence of that law change that our Government made, because it is our view that it is actually the enforcement of the standards that are already in the law. That is the key to ensuring that we improve the standards of rental accommodation.’’

But in fact, cases are not ‘‘prosecuted’’ under the tribunal.

Steve Watson, national manager for housing and tenancy compliance and investigations at Tenancy Services, a unit of the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment, said the exact number of cases ‘‘accepted’’ in the first 12 months of the unit’s existence was 405, but ‘‘so far, applications covering 262 individual tenancies have been lodged with the Tenancy Tribunal’’.

The unit is not there to fight every battle for tenants. It can take cases where it identifies ‘‘systematic non-compliant behaviours’’ that affect New Zealand’s most vulnerable tenants, are in the public interest, or damage the reputation of the tenancy market.

Unhealthy and damp properties have not been among the unit’s targets. Of the 262 cases, 254 involved landlords pocketing tenants’ bond instead of lodging it safely with Tenancy Services.

To date, however, only three Tenancy Services applications to the tribunal have resulted in orders being issued.