6 Jan 2021

Councils downplay powers to enforce healthy home standards

From Summer Times, 9:28 am on 6 January 2021

The government has been urged to adequately fund councils to enforce healthy home laws after an investigation found local authorities were failing to use existing regulatory powers to impose standards on landlords.

Renter advocacy group Renters United found that, across 68 councils, only 14 repair orders had been issued to private landlords by council officers in five years.

Houses around Lyttelton area in Christchurch

Photo: RNZ / Nate McKinnon

This was despite laws dating back to 1940 which required councils to enforce housing improvement regulations.

Renters United spokesman Robert Whitaker told Jesse Mulligan it was a case of councils being unable to meet obligations to enforce laws because of inadequate funding. He said central government now needed to step it and address the issue.

Whitaker also said councils were ideally placed to enforce new Healthy Home laws being introduced in July, instead of leaving it to tenants to enforce, as many were ill-quipped to understand the regulatory legislation and would be too afraid to jeopardise their tenancy.

He said the government should have foreseen this lack of enforcement clout as posing an issue to improving quality of housing for vulnerable tenants.

Renters United sent official information requests to councils across the country after it was discovered Wellington City Council was not using powers to ensure landlords were providing healthy and sanitary homes to tenants, Whitaker said.

The council had commissioned a report on the health of rental homes in its area, which noted the indiscrepancy.

“Although they tried to bury the lead a little bit, what came out of that report was actually they did have some powers that they weren’t really using to enforce that.

“The next logical step for us was to ask what other councils are doing as well.”

Whitaker said most councils weren’t using the powers pro-actively and the failure was partly due to councils having responsibilities without central government funding to be able to meet these obligations to enforce the law. No one in central government has been keeping an eye on local councils to see if these obligations were being met either.

The powers were enshrined in the Health Act. He said, for a period, people working in the rental market knew these rules applied, but that, since 1956, sanctions that councils could impose to enforce health laws had not been properly worked out.

“On the inspection side, however councils have a lot of powers to actually go and look at places and find out how they are and there are other places they could take these inspection reports to get these things enforced, like the Tenancy Tribunal,” he said.

In the absence of central government oversight, it had been left to councils to decide whether they wanted to use council resources to inspect rentals and in general, the authorities had decided not to, he added.

“It’s a shame, especially now that we’ve got such a crunch in the rental market and people are living in very substandard housing a lot of the time. Councils should be really taking the bull by the horn and using these powers as best they can to improve the quality of housing.”

He said some councils had claimed they worked closely with the Tenancy Tribunal, but Whitaker said he had not noticed many councils mentioned in tribunal cases.

“We looked at Auckland, and last year Auckland did 100 inspections across the whole of Auckland, so it’s not likely to be huge numbers of houses getting interventions where councils are involved in at the moment. We know that that problem housing is on a larger scale than that.”

He said Brands – a building research organisation – had carried out research that showed for most houses, the cost of upgrading a house to an acceptable standard was only a few thousand dollars, but he said landlords were reluctant pay that.

“There’s no market incentive at the moment for them to fix it and there’s no regulatory incentive because nobody is really enforcing it.”

Another enforcement issue has now surfaced with the government’s Healthy Homes Guarantee Act, passed in 2017. It imposes new standards on landlords from July, who must ensure their properties comply with the standards within 90 days of a new tenancy.

But it has been left to vulnerable tenants to enforce these, something Whitaker said posed a similar issue of adequate enforcement.

“The government has passed these new Healthy Home regulations and they’ve just left the enforcement to tenants, which is really not that reasonable,” he said.

“Tenants, for the most part, are not really willing to take their landlords to court, which is essentially what the Tribunal is like - over more minor things - when it places their housing in jeopardy. So, they’re in a really difficult spot when enforcing these rules for themselves.”

He said local councils would be better placed to enforce rules, as the authorities already had inspection teams and expertise, whereas tenants lacked the technical knowledge of the legislation to be able to make representations to their landlords. This would mean additional funding from central government to allocated to councils.

“Councils already inspect restaurants for hygiene standards, commercial buildings. They already have some in-house expertise and they can easily extend it.

Whitaker said lack of enforcement with the new legislation had been foreseeable, as Treasury had carried out research on enforcement methods, which found if reliance was placed on tenants to enforce the rules, the best-case scenario was a 60 percent compliance rate, with 40 percent of landlords simply ignoring the rules.

Other options, Whitaker said, included inspecting every household, or alternatively random audits, including stern sanctions to deter other landlords from flouting the legislation.

“If we aren’t going to have inspections of every house we need some sort of audit method that would make it much more likely that landlords will follow the rules.”