About 4000 people at any one time are staying for weeks or months in emergency housing, mostly at motels that have not been required to adhere to any standards that take account of their stressed and unusual use. Photo: RNZ / Cole Eastham-Farrelly
The government has imposed the first-ever standards specific to emergency housing providers.
Though they are not mandatory, any provider that does not opt in faces the cold shoulder from the Ministry of Social Development (MSD).
"From 6 November, we can only grant Emergency Housing Special Needs Grants ... for clients to stay with opted-in suppliers, except in some limited cases," Paula McManus, group general manager of housing, said.
Limited cases might include if they ran out of opted-in suppliers in a particular spot.
The new standards arrive in the wake of a key battle won last month over councils being able to force motels to up their game, and on top of a separate code of practice for transitional housing that kicked in on 1 July.
About 4000 people at any one time are staying for weeks or months in emergency housing, mostly at motels that have not been required to adhere to any standards that take account of their stressed and unusual use.
"MSD does not have any formal power to stop using a particular supplier, or to get them to comply with our expectations," a regulatory impact statement in late 2022 said.
It called for the government to "act swiftly" to set standards.
MSD's new standards cover such basics as motels having to provide a safe means to heat up food, the same level of services as paying guests get, and a family's right to keep their door locked.
The provider agrees to have an approved evacuation scheme and a building warrant of fitness - fires at several motels have alarmed the council in Rotorua.
"You will use reasonable efforts to provide the client with suitable sized accommodation for the number of people staying," was another standard, as was "you will respond to requests for repairs or maintenance within a reasonable timeframe".
Community Law's Sue Moroney said people displaced, whether by storms or economic reasons, had been at the mercy of a weak system, which had taken three years to set standards for.
"It's really great to see that they are there, [though] we would prefer that there was a requirement for all emergency housing suppliers to meet these very basic conditions," she said.
Sue Moroney. Photo: RNZ / Alexander Robertson
"At least with the supplier conditions in place, they will know the providers that have signed up to meet those, and importantly for us at Community Law, when people ... come to see us about something that's gone wrong with that emergency housing, we'll be able to say, 'Are they suppliers who have signed up to these standards?' And if so, then we can help people enforce that."
Four options were outlined for intervening back in 2022. The one they have now chosen was described as a "relatively 'light-touch' approach".
"This option would be easier to implement than other options and can be done relatively quickly," the 2022 report said.
General standards such as around fire safety have applied to emergency housing in theory, as they do to all buildings. But these did not take into account the escalation in risks from the novel use, and in practice councils have lacked the will, resource or muscle to enforce the basic rules.
Rotorua Lakes Council took the bull by the horns, last month winning a building regulation ruling that they can impose 'change of use' conditions on motels. The council pledged to use it to begin doing new checks on emergency housing providers.