HNZ to pay 800 evicted tenants

Housing New Zealand will compensate 800 tenants kicked out of their homes for meth tests the agency now admits were wrongly used and not needed.

In a huge mea culpa, the state housing agency has finally apologised and admitted to misusing a Ministry of Health guideline while pursuing a ‘‘dogmatic’’ policy of zero tolerance it now admits has ‘‘little merit’’ and cost $100 million in unnecessary tests and cleanup.

The apology and offer to compensate kicked-out tenants by between $2500 and $3000 comes as a report into the agency’s meth testing regime was finally released yesterday morning.

It found that between July 2013 and May 2018 nearly 5000 Housing New Zealand (HNZ) properties were tested for meth contamination, with about half of these tests testing positive for the toolow standard at the time.

Just one in five primary tenants were rehoused. The majority, just under 800, were found responsible and were kicked out of their properties, and 275 tenants were suspended from being housed by the agency for a period of one year.

Just one fifth of the tested properties would fail the new standard set in May, which is 10 times higher than the previous extremely low trigger.

Given most homes have more than one person but just a single primary tenant, around 2400 people were likely affected.

Furthermore, about $7m in damages was charged to 542 tenants. But less than 2 per cent of this was actually recovered before HNZ stopped seeking them

earlier in 2017, and that debt has now been cancelled.

HNZ expects to spend about $2.4m on the compensation.

No board member or employee has been fired over the matter however, with Housing Minister Phil Twyford saying he was not interested in ‘‘ritual sacrifice.’’

‘‘It’s very clear that through the course of the last Government HNZ were told explicitly to behave like a private sector landlord, to forget their social mandate,’’ Twyford said.

‘‘The people who I hold most accountable for this fiasco have already lost their jobs. They are no longer ministers.’’

HNZ head Andrew McKenzie said in hindsight the measures

had been misused.

‘‘Focusing on zero tolerance was wrong and ignored many of the issues that resulted in a state home being needed in the first place,’’ McKenzie said.

Twyford called on former social housing minister Paula Bennett to apologise to tenants.

Bennett has said she asked HNZ if the standard was too low at the time, something McKenzie corroborated.

But Twyford said that didn’t take away from the wider political context forced on HNZ by the National government, and from her ‘‘gloating’’ in the media.

Bennett in 2015 said ‘‘we are not going to risk houses suspected of being drug dens

today becoming potentially toxic playgrounds for innocent children in the future,’’ noting ‘‘quite serious health effects.’’

The report itself notes that the National government sought ‘‘operational efficiency’’ from HNZ with a requirement to return a dividend and focus on its ‘‘core functions as a landlord.’’

The compensation was for costs involved in rehousing, not the emotional distress and harm caused, Twyford said.

Green co-leader Marama Davidson said this wasn’t good enough and the amount of funding was ‘‘arbitrary’’.

‘‘Some of the impacts from being evicted from having your life uprooted will have life-long and ongoing harm. I think that is what the compensation should be focused on,’’ Davidson said. ‘‘I think former minister Paula Bennett should be deeply ashamed.’’

Davidson said it was unfortunate the HNZ chair Adrienne Young-Cooper had not fronted up for the press conference.

Twyford said the chair had a ‘‘long-standing’’ international trip which meant she couldn’t attend.

National’s housing spokeswoman Judith Collins said it was outrageous to compensate ‘‘crooks’’ from the taxpayers’ purse, and National’s ministers had been acting on the best advice at the time.

‘‘Methamphetamine gets into a house because the house is being used for an illegal activity,’’ Collins said. ‘‘When people were evicted from properties it was after that house has been used in some way for methamphetamine consumption.’’

‘‘Ministers don’t sit around setting the standards for a healthy limit of contamination. We are not the experts on this.’’

She noted that HNZ had a ‘‘zero-tolerance’’ of cigarette smoke in their properties but could not point to any case where a tenant had been evicted for tobacco use. ‘‘Phil Twyford is saying cigarettes are bad, but meth is fine, P is fine, it’s just a health issue?’’ Collins said.

She emphasised that the Gluckman report had only been a literature review, but stopped short of outright calling his scientific rigour into question, instead simply saying scientific knowledge shifted often.