Don’t can healthy homes, Nats told

Auckland’s largest real estate company wants National to halt plans to scrap new Healthy Homes standards if elected.

Barfoot & Thompson said cold and damp rental homes had been linked to the gruelling battle with respiratory disease that affected 700,000 Kiwis and cost billions of dollars each year.

It has co-signed a letter with the Asthma and Respiratory Foundation, doctors and other non-profits urging National leader Judith Collins to change tack and back the standards.

These require — from July 1, 2021 — that all rentals be fitted with insulation, heating and ventilation within 90 days of an existing tenant renewing their lease or a new tenant moving in.

Collins has called it “landlord bashing” and vowed to roll back the scheme if elected. The cost of refitting rental properties would drive rents up and hit renters in the hip pocket, she said.

But Barfoot & Thompson director Kiri Barfoot said the standards were not just good for tenants, but the whole country.

“Healthier homes mean children get a good night’s sleep and then turn up to school and get an education — and people don’t get so sick,” she said.

The debate over Healthy Homes standards has turned into a major point of difference between the main political parties heading into next month’s general election.

Labour — which introduced a raft of tenant-friendly laws over the past three years of the Coalition Government it led — has sought to portray itself as the party representing renters’ rights.

National claims it has gone into bat for landlords and the free market’s power to deliver homes tenants want.

National housing spokeswoman Jacqui Dean said her party would not roll back current insulation standards. But it would remove regulations that caused “an unnecessary burden” on landlords and drove up rents.

These included “the rules making it difficult to remove problematic tenants, the ability for tenants to modify rentals without permission, and regulations prescribing heating output on qualifying heaters that require advanced mathematics to interpret”.

“National wants tenants to live in warm, dry homes but hitting landlords with too many regulations too quickly, without any incentives, only leaves fewer people wanting to be landlords,” she said. There would be fewer rentals available.

Dean claimed Labour’s attack on landlords had already driven average rents up by $2600 a year.

However, the Barfoot & Thompson letter — co-signed by groups such as the Hutt Valley District Health Board, Community Housing Aotearoa, NZ Green Building Council and university researchers — said cold and damp homes already cost the economy millions each year.

This was because Kiwis were going to hospital 80,000 times each year with respiratory complaints, high electricity bills and lost productivity resulting from ill children and families struggling to fulfill their potential.