National Party admits it sold too many state houses

Tuesday, 7 July 2020

National’s new housing spokesperson has admitted the party was wrong to sell and convert more state houses than it built when it was last in office.

Nicola Willis, who took the housing portfolio in a recent reshuffle, told RNZ the net reduction in state houses under the last National government showed that governments needed to continue increasing the number of state houses.

Willis said National sold or converted “a couple of thousand” state homes.

“I think what we can see from that is yes, the Government needs to build state houses,” she said.

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Willis accepted there was net loss of state houses under National.

“What I don’t think is that that was good; what I would like to see is the Government continuing to build state houses, that’s absolutely a policy that either National or Labour needs to continue in the years ahead.”

She said about a thousand of the houses that were sold were moved out of Government hands and into community ownership, which she believed was the right thing to do.

The current Government had continued to use community housing providers.

Willis was speaking on the news that the number of households waiting for state housing had hit a new high.

Of the 17,982 households waiting over 16,000 were “Priority A” – meaning they had been identified as being in urgent need.

The wait list has ballooned in recent years, trebling​ from the 5844 households on the wait list when the current Government was elected in September 2017.

The current Government had boosted the construction of state houses. The latest housing dashboard showed that 2813 state homes had been built since June 2018 and a further 2596 were under construction.

Willis said National acknowledged government building was part of the solution to the housing crisis, but it had to be supplemented further by reform of the Resource Management Act (RMA) and rental regulations, which were discouraging investment.

She said that National’s record on housing would have been better if it had been allowed to stay in power for longer, as many better, well-insulated houses were under construction when the party left government after the 2017 election.

“There were houses that we took down, and we took down one and replaced it with three that were insulated.

“The reason we were removing some houses was that we could replace them with more.

“We would have continued to increase the number of state houses, that was all under development.

“We were on a pathway to increase New Zealand’s state housing stock, and we can debate whether we were too late coming to that; I’m here for the future,” Willis said.

The current Government was also having difficulty defending its own record on housing. Its flagship KiwiBuild housing programme was meant to build thousands of homes a year, but to date, fewer than 400 have been completed.

It was so far behind that it would take more than 400 years to reach its 10-year goal of building 100,000 houses.

It had a far better record on state housing, adding thousands of houses to the stock, although this had not been enough to keep up with a skyrocketing housing wait list.

Willis said the latest figures were “an indictment on the Government”.

“Labour came into office promising to solve New Zealand’s housing challenges and they’ve utterly failed to do that,” she said.

She said solving the housing crisis would require more than building state houses, as homes built by the Government were only a small proportion of overall housing.

Willis said National’s policy of repealing and replacing the RMA would allow more housing to be built.