A backward step on housing

For anyone on the receiving end, the style in which policies are delivered can signify just as much as the policy itself.

Last week’s decision by Housing New Zealand to shut its offices to clients – and talk to them only via a national call centre – is a good example, especially since the voluntary agencies dealing with the people most affected were not consulted beforehand, and learned of the decision only by letter.

From early April, Housing New Zealand clients will be unable to seek help from the agency’s offices, unless they’ve arranged a meeting beforehand with a case manager.

(The explanatory letter encourages people who don’t have a phone to try logging on to the Housing New Zealand website at a public library.)

The right to shelter is a central feature of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

In today’s world of tough-love attitudes towards those in need, the wording of the United Nations Declaration on the right of access to adequate levels of social services seems to belong to an earlier, far kinder age: ‘‘Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.’’

The right to shelter is in particularly poor shape, owing to the way that successive New Zealand governments have dropped the ball on affordable housing.

In February, the Building and Housing Department forecast that this country would need to build 20,000 to 23,000 housing units a year over the next five years, merely to keep pace with population growth.

For the past three years, however, we have been building them at fewer than 15,000 units a year.

Housing is a chronic problem, as the Salvation Army pointed out a few weeks ago in its annual report on the nation’s social needs.

Over the past five years, about 64 per cent of New Zealand’s population growth has occurred in Auckland, yet only 25 per cent of the new building consents in that time have been for Auckland.

Central and local government, the Sallies’ report says, seem unable to comprehend the scale of the housing problem, let alone to have an action plan to deal with it, despite repeated warnings from independent agencies – who, as I mentioned earlier, were not consulted before access to help with housing needs was unilaterally restricted by the main government agency delegated to assist those most in housing need.

Moreover, even the Wellington Night Shelter reportedly now needs to leave a message with the Housing New Zealand call centre if it wants to contact case managers and deal with clients.

Rather than directly meet its United Nations obligations, the Government seems to be playing musical chairs with access to affordable housing.

Instead of the old ‘‘ state house for life’’ approach, the current policy preference is for reviewable tenancies, and for more stringent methods of assessing housing needs, including an income means test.

According to Housing Minister Phil Heatley, these changes were designed to produce a fairer system aimed at ensuring those in most need get housed the quickest.

Provided, of course, that those most in need can get through on the 0800 call centre number.