Kanwaljit Singh Bakshi
Prime Minister John Key recently announced Social Housing reform.
Over the next three years, the government will provide support to more vulnerable New Zealanders where they need it most.
Therefore, our Housing Reform programme will see low-income and vulnerable New Zealanders getting housing support that better meets their needs.
Major Objectives
Our reforms have five major objectives.
We will ensure that people who need housing support from the government can get it by increasing funding for social house subsidies by 3000 places to about 65,000 places by 2017-2018 at a cost of $40 million.
We will shortly offer an initial 300 income-related rent subsidies to community housing providers.
We will also be focusing on helping social housing tenants towards independence, wherever appropriate. To do this, we will be completing 3000 extra tenancy reviews in the next couple of years focusing on market or near-market renters.
This will take the number of planned reviews to almost 5000 over the next two years.
Financial help
Tenants in properties that are sold will continue to be housed for the duration of their need, and financial help may be offered to some people on the social housing register who may not need to be in the social housing system.
It is also important to ensure that properties used for social housing are the right size and configuration and that these are in the right place.
A review of Housing New Zealand including how it manages its assets will be undertaken to ensure we are delivering better services to the community.
We will accelerate Housing New Zealand’s programme of building the type of new homes that are wanted and in the places they are needed, while disposing of houses that are no longer needed.
In the process, we are ensuring that we increase affordable housing supply, particularly in Auckland by asking Housing New Zealand to accelerate redevelopment of its land to free up more land for private, affordable housing and to rejuvenate state housing neighbourhoods and suburbs with a wider mix of housing.
Diverse ownership
We will encourage more diverse ownership of social housing.
Community housing providers and Maori will be consulted with a view to selling between 1000 and 2000 Housing New Zealand properties over the coming year for use as social housing run by approved community housing providers.
This policy adds to previously announced initiatives focused on housing, including helping first homebuyers into their first home with our changes to KiwiSaver affecting tens of thousands of Kiwis.
Kanwaljit Singh Bakshi has been a Member of Parliament on National List since 2008.
