Needless P evictions ‘a farce’, Labour says

Housing New Zealand has wasted taxpayer money and unnecessarily evicted hundreds of tenants by inaccurately using P contamination guidelines in a crackdown, Labour says.

However, the Crown corporation continues to dispute suggestions that it has behaved improperly, saying it followed ‘‘the only source of guidance’’ on contamination available to it.

A report prepared for the Ministry of Health and released this week said the current guidelines for methamphetamine contamination were too stringent.

Houses where P was smoked, rather than manufactured, were able to safely have contamination levels up to four times higher than the current rules, the report said.

This news has led some to criticise Housing New Zealand for its use of the guidelines to evict tenants and decontaminate homes, with the New Zealand Drug Foundation saying the state agency should compensate anyone kicked out off ‘‘P-contaminated’’ homes that were well below safe levels.

Labour housing spokesman Phil Twyford said the Government needed to ‘‘rein in’’ Housing New Zealand over its misuse of P testing procedures.

Twyford said the state corporation had failed to distinguish between houses where P had been smoked and where it had been manufactured, while the lack of baseline testing meant it was difficult to know whether contamination had been caused by a current or previous tenant.

‘‘It’s a farce, and they’ve wasted a very significant amount of taxpayers’ money and arguably evicted hundreds of tenants unnecessarily.’’

The lack of alternative guidelines for houses where P had only been smoked was not a sufficient excuse to misuse the current rules.

‘‘This is a problem that’s experienced by countries all over the world; I cannot believe that the science does not exist for them to do that properly.

‘‘It doesn’t mean that because the current set of guidelines you’ve got are inadequate, you go out and evict hundreds of tenants and close down hundreds of houses in the middle of a housing crisis – that’s mad.’’

The Government had been ‘‘strangely quiet’’ about the issue, and needed to provide a ‘‘full public accounting of the financial and human costs’’, Twyford said.

Housing New Zealand Minister Bill English denied the corporation had failed to act on problems with the guidelines. ‘‘Housing NZ can only apply the standards that experts hand to them ... that standard’s now changed so they’ll change their procedures.’’