The Government allocated $335 million to review and redesign the emergency housing system in this year's Budget. Photo / File
The Government allocated $335 million to review and redesign the emergency housing system in this year's Budget. Photo / File
About 200 Kiwi kids live in cars across New Zealand, up from 51 in December 2017, says National Party housing spokesman Chris Bishop.
Bishop has criticised Labour’s response to the situation, attacking Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s initial promises to fix the crisis five years ago.
“Jacinda Ardern said in 2017, ‘I refuse to stand by while children are sleeping in cars’,” he said.
“It is a tragedy that any child in New Zealand is going to sleep in a car every night. Living in an emergency motel isn’t much better, but that’s the reality for around 4000 other Kiwi kids – four times as many since Labour took office.”
Bishop said Labour has built just 1.4 per cent of its promised 100,000 KiwiBuild homes and it is spending $1 million a week on emergency housing. The state house waitlist is up by 20,000 applicants in the past five years.
Housing Minister Megan Woods has previously defended the Government’s record on housing saying there were “so many sell-offs of public housing” under National that the party left office with 1,500 fewer state homes than it began with.
“National failed to invest in new public housing and instead bled $576 million out of the public housing agency in dividends. What’s more is that National failed to maintain the housing it did retain, and that deferred maintenance for pre-1970s housing is now costing tens of millions of dollars per year,” Woods said.
She said the current Government “has rebuilt the state’s ability to grow and provide public housing with the biggest state house building programme since the 1970s. If National had built public housing at the same rate we are, there would be nearly 23,000 new state houses, accounting for 94% of those on the current waiting list”.
In this year’s Budget, the Government allocated $335 million to review and redesign the emergency housing system. A plan is due to go before Cabinet in the next few months.
Statistics from the end of September show the wait list for emergency housing is now more than 26,500, while the average occupancy is now more than 20 weeks - up from three weeks in 2018.
Social Development Minister Carmel Sepuloni has previously said: “This goes back to the housing crisis that we inherited [from the National government].
“We picked up that challenge, we’re running with it, we’re doing it as quickly as we can, but this is a result of decades of neglect,” she said.
National's housing spokesman Chris Bishop called Labour's response to the housing crisis "an utter failure". Photo / Mark Mitchell
Bishop said it was an “utter failure” by the Government, and claims Labour does not have a plan to fix what is now a “housing catastrophe”.
“Labour’s flagship housing policy, KiwiBuild, is the poster child of their inability to deliver,” he said.
“In July 2018, the Government said that KiwiBuild would deliver 1000 homes within a year, another 5000 by June 2020, and 10,000 in total by June 2021. But as of September 2022, they have only built 1430 KiwiBuild homes.”
Bishop said at its current rate, KiwiBuild will reach the 100,000 mark in the year 2315.
“KiwiBuild is arguably the biggest policy failure in New Zealand’s history,” Bishop said.
He also said National would partner with the community housing sector to get more houses built, reverse Labour’s Tenant Tax and brightline test extension, and use a social investment approach to get people into transitional housing with “wraparound support”.
Woods said the party believed the “state has a role in providing a safety net to people who need public housing. These ten thousand additional homes mean thousands of families and individuals have moved into warm, dry homes across the country from Northland to Invercargill”.
“It’s not only those living in public housing that benefit from this pipeline of activity; regional economies and the construction sector is boosted with jobs and critical infrastructure investment, all helping to secure New Zealand’s economy for future generations.”
