Housing New Zealand sorry for meth mess

Housing New Zealand chief executive Andrew McKenzie has apologised for over-the-top meth standards and expects the organisation will pay some compensation to wrongfully evicted tenants.

But he would not admit the agency had misused a Ministry of Health standard, saying that it was acting on the best possible advice at the time.

McKenzie said yesterday that the state housing provider ‘‘really regrets what’s happened here’’.

‘‘The moving standards and guidelines that we had to operate to – we apologise to people whose lives have been disrupted by that. While we had the best interests from a health and safety perspective of our tenants at heart they were moved needlessly and we do apologise for that.’’

He had an estimate of about 300 households that had been moved because of the overly onerous standard, although a ‘‘large number of them’’ would have been rehoused.

Housing NZ pursued many of these tenants for the costs of the needless cleaning and testing in the Tenancy Tribunal, sometimes for tens of thousands of dollars. The tenants were often told to destroy all of their possessions.

McKenzie said tenants still paying those amounts back would not have to and he would report to the minister about how much had already been paid with a view to compensating them.

The Government released a report last week making clear that houses where methamphetamine had only been consumed, and not produced, posed no health risk for tenants.

For years Housing NZ had misapplied a 2010 Ministry of Health standard, meant to target the cleanup of properties where meth had been produced, not consumed, as a trigger to begin cleaning and evicting tenants where there was no suspicion of meth production.

This caused tens of millions of dollars in wasted cleaning and testing costs and saw hundreds of tenants needlessly moved on.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern refused to rule compensation in or out.

She also refused to say whether those evicted due to meth contamination would be put at the top of the HNZ waiting list.

‘‘They certainly shouldn’t be blacklisted,’’ she told Radio NZ.