Are the Healthy Homes standards fit for purpose?

Are the Healthy Homes standards fit for purpose? There must surely be an easier and more practical way to implement minimum standards for housing.

I have worked in property management for nearly two decades, and one thing that I can assure you is that there has never been a dull moment. It has many challenges and has significantly evolved from when I first started.

Without a doubt, one of the most challenging aspects of what we must deal with is Healthy Homes. It has led me to the conclusion that there must surely be an easier and more practical way to implement minimum standards for housing.

Firstly, I am firmly of the belief that we need minimum standards. All tenants have the right to a warm, dry, and safe environment, especially as we see more and more families forced into renting as a long-term option. 

However, regarding Healthy Homes, we have created a bureaucratically confusing set of standards with moving goalposts where criteria and dates are changed. We have seen things that could be improved with the heating calculator, with landlords wasting thousands of dollars on top-up heat pumps that were not required and will probably never be used. The Government has had to move dates around as it became clear that they would fail to meet their own standards.

Our Tenancy Agreement was two pages long when I started in the industry. Now, if you go off the Tenancy Services Tenancy Agreement, you must complete a 25-page document, including a 16-page Healthy Homes compliance statement. Our population is comprised of a melting pot of cultures and ethnicities, and English will likely not be their first language. Do we really need to have such a complex document as an agreement and do these tenants understand what they are signing and agreeing to?

Along with the compliance statement, the landlord also must be able to provide proof of compliance by having evidence. We have also seen, similar to the Methamphetamine debacle, a new industry evolve in carrying out Healthy Homes inspections. 

Anyone can carry out these inspections without training, and issues around compliance are often open to translation. The rollout of the standards has been a bureaucratic nightmare creating confusion, frustration, and an increased workload for our industry.

I have no issue with the increased workload to ensure that homes are warm and safe, but the standards focus on five individual criteria rather than the outcome of whether the property is fit for purpose. I have seen properties that comply with Healthy Homes, yet they are poorly maintained with rotten weatherboards on the exterior.

The concept of setting Healthy Homes Standards has been around for about a decade. It failed at its first attempt to get through Parliament. Still, its second attempt passed through the House of Representatives as it got through its first reading when National was in power because National's coalition partners, The Māori Party, and United Futures, both went across the floor and voted in support of the Labour-backed bill. 

Once Labour formed a government in 2017, it fast-tracked the bill and became law in 2017, with the first standards coming into effect on the 1st of July 2019. The first compliance deadline for new and renewed tenancies was the 1st of July 2021. Since then, we have seen issues with the heating calculator as some new builds were failing heating standards due to errors in calculating the R-Value of some of the materials being used for construction. We have seen adjustments in insulation settings and changes in dates and timeframes.

Even prominent Green MP Chlöe Swarbrick believes Healthy Homes is failing to deliver. I found myself nodding in agreement with her when I attended a recent conference as she said it should be scrapped and replaced with a Rental Warrant of Fitness programme. Swarbrick rightly points out that the Government has no idea how many homes are registered as Healthy Homes compliant, how many companies hold themselves out to be capable of issuing Healthy Homes compliance certification and whether they are trained and qualified. Likewise, there is nothing stopping landlords from issuing their own certificates.

As approximately 50% of all rentals are managed by owners, there is no way of accurately assessing the level of compliance across New Zealand.

My view is that for the level of work that Healthy Homes have created versus the outcomes obtained, Healthy Homes has failed to deliver. I think New Zealand should move to a Europe and UK-based Energy Performance Certification (EPC) showing the energy efficiency and emissions of the property by using a grading system like what you see on household appliances and vehicles. Properties must be assessed every five years, and if a property is found to be below a certain threshold, then it can only be tenanted once improvements are made and reassessed. This focuses on outcomes rather than individual criteria that are open to interpretation and has become a bureaucratic nightmare to manage. 

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