Phil Twyford said, with hindsight, we now know the houses should never have been built where they are. Photo / NZME
Former Cabinet Minister Phil Twyford has written to the Government urging it to help flood-stricken homeowners in his Te Atatū electorate by buying them out.
He said that many homeowners had been flooded twice in the past 18 months and felt “traumatised”.
“They cannot face returning to their homes,” he wrote.
Twyford said that requiring these homeowners to rebuild where they were was irresponsible and impractical, knowing that they would likely be flooded again. He told ministers that in the most extreme cases, homeowners should have the option of a voluntary buy-out to be able to move on and live elsewhere.
“There are about 10 neighbourhoods in my electorate that were badly affected by anniversary weekend floods,” Twyford told the Herald.
He said they were “all houses that were built on overland paths and floodplains”.
Tywford said councils had been consenting these homes for “30 years”.
“The council has been consenting new homes in floodplains right up until now,” he said.
In his letter, Twyford said that “in hindsight we now know they should never have been built there. And we know surely that it makes no sense now for those homeowners to just rebuild in the same place”.
“But unless managed retreat is adopted, my constituents will be forced to either rebuild in the same place and wait for the next flood, or walk away from their properties and face financial ruin”.
Climate Change Minister James Shaw is currently working on adaptation legislation, which will look at the issue of “managed retreat” - essentially how homeowners and the Government fund the cost of moving people away from climate change-prone settlements.
This legislation will not be passed by the election, however and ministers, including Shaw, have floated the idea of taking action before the legislation is passed to ensure that the rebuild following the Auckland Floods and Cyclone Gabrielle does not happen in places that will continue to be regularly inundated.
“I’m currently working that through with the Ministry for the Environment and saying, ‘Look, are there things in the adaptation work programme, which if we were to accelerate them right now, would make more of a difference?’” Shaw said last week.
Twyford had a calculation that found there were 66 houses in the catchment in his electorate and “possibly” 4 commercial buildings that would flood under a 1-in-100-year event like the floods of 2021, or a 1-in-250 year event like the floods of 2023.
He said there were “helpful precedents” for moving properties from vulnerable locations in Matata, Westport and Waitakere City Council’s use of voluntary buy-outs to purchase (or part purchase) around 165 properties in West Auckland’s flood plains in the 2000s.
In the aftermath of the floods, the Government has come under attack for its enthusiastic promotion of urban intensification, particularly through the MDRS, which allows the easy development of three, three-story buildings on urban sections.
Twyford is an enthusiastic promoter of intensification and, as minister, was the mastermind of the NPS-UD, the Government’s first attempt at widespread intensification of our biggest cities.
Act leader David Seymour has been critical of the MDRS in the aftermath of the floods saying it allows intensification where the stormwater infrastructure is not ready.
“It basically says intensification can happen anywhere, and if the pipes aren’t ready … well they’ve never really explained what happens then,” Seymour has said.
Twyford shot back at this saying that Seymour’s comments were “a mischievous misreading of the legislation”.
“There is nothing that requires councils to consent developments on flood plains,” Twyford said.
Flood plains are a qualifying matter under the legislation, allowing councils to carve them out of the intensification rules, blocking them from being developed.
“Intensification is not the problem here - it is the solution,” Twyford said.
Twyford said that by not intensifying cities enough, councils had forced development in land that should not be built on.
Instead, he argued that densification means that more people could live on land that was not prone to flooding, allowing fewer people to live on land that was flood prone.
“Build the houses that are needed in places that are not prone to flooding,” Twyford said.
The controversial bill was introduced in Parliament yesterday.