Minister pops in for Hutt ‘housewarming party’
With just one day before the official start of winter, the Government has announced an ambitious plan to retrofit 66 homes in Hutt Valley with insulation before the end of the year.
During a visit to one of the six homes already insulated, Housing Minister Phil Twyford said the scheme, which comes at a cost of $9.3 million, was a fraction of the Government’s investment across the rental housing sector.
‘‘I believe [this is] the single most important health reform that we can make. It’s crazy that we send about 40,000 kids off to hospital every year with respiratory and infectious diseases caused by cold, damp homes.’’
Most of the 66 houses being upgraded will be in Taita and Naenae, with a longer-term plan to do the same to an additional 200 houses in the wider Hutt area.
‘‘Hutt Valley has about 3400 state houses and much of the housing stock is old and in need of retrofitting so this is a great place for us to start,’’ Twyford said.
While only a handful of the houses have been completed so far, Twyford was confident the upgrades would all be complete by the end of 2018.
The upgrades mean future tenants could expect a temperature of 20 degrees Celsius in the living areas and 18C in the bedrooms, falling within the World Health Organisation’s standards for the optimum living temperature.
Some feeling a little cooler have been those left stunned by the Government’s bombshell report, released on Tuesday, that revealed there was no danger to humans from third-hand exposure to a house where methamphetamine had been consumed.
The study by the prime minister’s chief science adviser Peter Gluckman found New Zealand authorities had made a ‘‘leap in logic’’ setting standards.
Yesterday, the agency said it could not say how many of Wellington’s homes were vacant because of methamphetamine contamination.
‘‘We are assessing those properties that are at/below 15μg /100cm2 [the new recommended level] and there is decontamination in progress. We expect to have those properties available for re-letting within the coming weeks,’’ a spokesman said.
In December 2016, the agency’s quarterly reported showed 48 of the region’s 344 empty homes were meth contaminated; since then, a change in reporting has meant the classification is not used.
Currently, 158 homes across Wellington, Porirua, Hutt Valley and Ka¯ piti are empty for a variety of reasons, according to the latest quarterly report.
In 2017, Stuff reported Housing NZ had spent $51.9m on meth decontamination in just 12 months, a 147 per cent increase on the $21m spent in the previous year and something then-social housing minister Amy Adams put down to increased testing.