Housing Restructuring and Tenancy Matters (Information Matching) Amendment Bill

Is this the title debate now?

The CHAIRPERSON (H V Ross Robertson): This is clauses 1 and 2. I have called the member; is he taking the call? The member should take the call. It is wide ranging, Mr Clarkson, so you have plenty of room and scope.

I have not had much dinner, and that is the problem; I am not thinking clearly. I am pleased to speak on this Housing Restructuring and Tenancy Matters (Information Matching) Amendment Bill. As I said before, the bill needs a different name. During the break I came up with another one. I suggest that it should be called the “Housing Recovery from Rip-offs (Carter’s Second Attempt) Bill”. I have studied State housing and houses for the last 18 months. By the way, 18 months is longer than I have been here. It shocks me how the Government has allowed a major waste of money in many areas of this field. The bureaucrats have failed, and there are no ifs or buts about that.

I myself have had vast experience in the house rental market and I know how State tenants can and will use all the tricks in the world to delay paying deposits or rent. They may say that mum and dad will pay the rent but they are out of town at the moment.

💬 Shane Jones: The cheque’s in the mail!

That is right—that happens a lot. I myself did own a lot of houses and I know that does happen. The Hon David Benson-Pope has finally got something right—this is a good bill. The gentleman is not here to hear me say that. I have cases of three lots of tenants living in State houses, and I believe that they are all claiming rent subsidies or benefits. This bill will sort that out. I believe that we should help disadvantaged people—members should take note of that—but we should attack the ones who are ripping the system off. I think the Government will get a shock when it sees how many people are ripping off the system.

💬 Jill Pettis: Name them.

If we get this bill going, we will certainly find those people. I know of cases where State house tenants are taking in boarders, and I believe that is a major problem throughout the country. In some cases the boarders pay rent that is then used to pay the Housing New Zealand Corporation. It is a stupid situation. It is a shocking situation and the people of New Zealand are sick and tired of it.

I also think the Housing New Zealand Corporation should pass incomes declared by tenants to the Inland Revenue Department for confirmation. The Inland Revenue Department could report back on any false income amounts and we might get some truth in the matter. If tenants are honest, they have nothing to fear. We are here to help them, if we get the right information. Any tenant who gives wrong information should be barred from having a State house.

💬 Hon Judith Tizard: Forever?

Well, yes, until they die, then. This information sharing will also—why did members not laugh when I said that?

💬 Phil Heatley: No sense of humour.

“Thick” is the word. The information sharing will also help to find people owing benefit debts to the Crown. The losses in the State house sector are terrible. I actually made a speech about that in the select committee the other day and got stuck into it. The losses are absolutely shocking. We should welcome anything that helps to fix that problem, and we should be pleased. National—and I want to make this point clear—is not against helping the disadvantaged. We just want a fair deal for all, and we want the Labour members to open their ears and listen instead of mouthing all the time. Let us get this bill through. National can make it even better later on. We support the bill.

I want to take a very brief call in support of this bill. I think it is really important when we look at the bill’s title that we understand that what is happening here is information matching, not information sharing, which is a little bit different. What we have here is two Government departments in possession of important information, often about the same people, and they will be able to measure that information against each other to check whether any rort is going on. I think everybody would agree that that is important.

What the bill does not do is to pass on information to an organisation that did not previously have it. That is an important thing. In terms of future developments regarding information, when information is passed from one organisation to another, we need to be extremely careful. I am very glad that we have an Office of the Privacy Commissioner that offers the kind of advice it does to make sure that we keep ourselves in check in that regard.

United Future believes that this bill is really important, for two reasons. It is very important to match this information so that people are getting the entitlements they are due. Where people may perhaps be entitled to more than they understood they were, this is a way of isolating and identifying that those people may be short-changed. Of course, the second reason is that this measure provides us with the opportunity to make sure that people are not double-dipping in the system, which is to the detriment of the New Zealand taxpayer and to the detriment of other people who are in need of the services of Work and Income and the Housing New Zealand Corporation. We are very pleased to support the bill, we think it has merit, and we wish it well on its passage through the House.

I stand to support the Housing Restructuring and Tenancy Matters (Information Matching) Amendment Bill, and I am delighted to have the opportunity to speak a little more broadly on it than I have previously. I found it quite restrictive speaking within the parts, so I am sure the Minister of Housing, the Hon Chris Carter, will agree that it is nice for me to have the opportunity to talk a little about the bigger picture and what it means for this information-matching amendment bill to go through. I would certainly like the Minister to take a call and address for us, yet again, the issue of the single core benefit and the fact that it has been going through the throes and bureaucracy of Parliament for many, many years now, and still we keep being told it is coming, it is coming. I have questions as to how information matching—particularly when it comes to the entitlement part of the bill and ensuring that people are getting their dues—will work in relation to the benefit changes we are looking at with the single core benefit.

The other thing I am very keen for the Minister to talk a little about is how 60,000 letters were distributed via the Housing New Zealand Corporation’s database. There have been calls for the Minister to do that this evening, and I back my colleague the knowledgable and incredibly talented, when it comes to matters of housing, Phil Heatley. It has to be a concern, as far as the privacy of people’s information is concerned, that a malicious letter was sent out before the election campaign. It informed people that if a National Government were elected, they could expect to be thrown out of their State houses, which of course was not true. It was a complete and utter lie. What that did was to fill people with fear.

The question we need to ask, when we are looking at the issue of information matching, is where that information came from and how people gained access to it. We have asked those questions at the Social Services Committee and we asked the Privacy Commissioner about the matter, but we have been stalled and dead-ended. Those are important questions. Leaving aside the fact that the letter was intended to work against the National Party and that sort of thing, we need to look at the broader implications of that sort of knowledge being out there and what it means for the protection of a person’s right to privacy.

The Housing Restructuring and Tenancy Matters (Information Matching) Amendment Bill also talks about transparency and openness, which is something the National Party is delighted to be supporting. We like that level of transparency. We believe that information is power and that sharing it between the two departments makes sense. It makes so much sense that we tried to introduce something like this bill in 1999. Of course, it was National that saw that this bill would give the opportunity to open that up, and to have information going from one person in one department to the next. The ramifications are that this bill will benefit those people receiving welfare payments, because it means they can look at whether they are getting their full entitlement, and whether they are able to survive on that payment.

When it comes to income-related rents, it is always an interesting matter as to how much we help people with a hand up and not a handout. I know that the Minister addressed the matter earlier this evening, but I ask him yet again about the implications of second and third-generation welfare dependants coming through in relation to State housing. I unashamedly say that National has greater aspirations for them than that. Living on welfare and being in a State house is OK, and thank goodness such support is there for those who need that sort of assistance, but it is not the end, and it should not be the means, for those New Zealanders. They can aspire to having more, and we want to be able to take that idea to them and actually share it with them. Information sharing may actually help those people with that side of things.

My colleagues have certainly touched on the issue of welfare fraud a bit, and I agree that this bill will decrease the level of fraud—it will make it that little bit more difficult. Personally, I do not think a huge epidemic of welfare fraud is going on throughout society; I think it concerns a smaller portion. The sad thing, of course, is that those few in the minority make things sound bad and give everyone a bad reputation. We certainly believe in the carrot and stick approach, and this legislation gives an opportunity for us to come down hard on those who actually are rorting the system and taking money from those who really do need it and do deserve it. The facts are that when we spend a dollar on someone who is receiving it illegally and wrongly, it is a dollar taken from someone else who, possibly, really does need it to get by, and who deserves it.

I would like to make a short contribution, first of all to thank the National Party and those other parties in the Chamber that will be supporting this legislation, which is, as the member for United Future said, about a data-sharing programme that will ultimately benefit those in State houses who may well not be receiving the full entitlement they are entitled to. The bill is also to avoid that serious issue I spoke about earlier, whereby people can, inadvertently, be overpaid in their benefits. This will help to correct that sort of situation. So it is very pleasing to hear some positive comments from the Opposition.

Of course, we did hear a number of other, rather foolish things. I heard some comments earlier about boarders. I would like to remind the Committee that State house tenants have been able to have boarders since the 1970s. Sadly, a lot of the time between then and now was spent under a National Government, but National did nothing about it because—well, why would they? Two-thirds of boarders are family members, and who would want to deny the chance of a grandparent, a parent, or adult children to stay in a State house? As I said, that is a situation that has existed since the 1970s.

We also heard Mr Clarkson say some positive things about the need to give support to people who need it. I am sure I do not need to remind him that we do indeed have a list of 11,000 tenants who are waiting to get into social housing. The previous National Government sold 13,000 of those State houses. Did it sell them to the tenants? No! About a quarter went to tenants and three-quarters went to speculators. I wonder whether Mr Clarkson was one of those who bought some of those State houses. A great deal of money was made, of course, out of housing that was paid for by the taxpayers of New Zealand—and we have now a waiting list of 11,000 people. With those 13,000 houses we would have alleviated the need of New Zealanders today.

So I thank Opposition parties for their support for this legislation—those that are supporting it. I urge them to remember that social housing is something that all developed countries seek to provide in as best a way as they can. Just having returned this morning from the UK, where I attended a housing conference at York in the north of England, I was very pleased to see that the Housing New Zealand Corporation is at the cutting edge, internationally, of a really first-class service in providing houses to New Zealanders who have a housing need. It is a corporation that the Auditor-General’s report, just released to this Parliament a week ago, stated was doing a good job.

In this last discussion around this bill I would like to reiterate that National is supporting the bill as the party that originally brought the idea to this Parliament in 1999. In turn, I thank the Minister, Chris Carter, and Labour members for supporting one of our ideas, and I ask the Minister to consider many others that we have rolling forward at the moment. It might interest him to wander off to England—to have some nice nights in restaurants and hotels, to enjoy the company, perhaps, of the royal family, or to do whatever the Minister does over there—but, clearly, if the Minister is adopting National policy, it would be easier to walk a mere 5 metres across this Chamber, get the ideas, and then pass them into legislation, as he has done with this Housing Restructuring and Tenancy Matters (Information Matching) Amendment Bill. So I thank the Minister for his support.

I would like to clarify the issues around boarders. Of course, National was aware while we were looking after the finances of New Zealand over that 9-year period that some State house tenants had boarders, and we were happy to have boarders in State houses. Who would deny a State housing family the right to have their 16-year-old kid in the house while he or she was studying at polytech? Of course, we would not. Who would deny State house tenants having their 75-year-old grandmother live at home with them? I guess if the Minister wants to label that person as a boarder, then who would deny that? Certainly, National would not.

We do not mind one or two boarders being in a State home, especially not family members who are in need, but my question to the Minister asked what was the maximum number of boarders that a State house tenant had in New Zealand. The answer was not three boarders, or four, or five, or even six. We have one tenancy in this country in which there are seven boarders under a State house roof. That is not a State house; that is a boarding house. That is a business. It is both a boarding house and a business. The Minister reported back to me that many State homes had four, five, and six boarders, and I have illustrated the worst situation where there were seven. I say that because New Zealanders, Kiwis, who pay their taxes, have asked me to say that. We never envisaged that we would be paying our taxes so that State house tenants who were not in need could have five, six, or seven boarders. That was not the intention. We as taxpayers provide State houses for families who are in need. People tell me that if families need to house a couple of extra relatives in the situations I have pointed out—the 16-year-old at polytech or grandma at home—then they accept that. But we do not accept the Minister providing State housing for five, six, or seven boarders. I tell members now that Kiwis will not put up with that, and it is not something that National believes in.

National does believe in this legislation, though, and that is why we support it. Information matching is very important—yes, for the reasons the Minister says, so that those who are in need can assure themselves that they are getting the full extent of taxpayer help when they are struggling. Information matching is also important to catch the ratbags who are ripping off mum and dad Kiwi workers who pay their taxes. Those workers have had enough of it. The majority of people in State houses are genuine, but some are ratbags. Sometimes they are second or third generation Labour Party voters who have been caught up in the cycle of welfare dependency—who have been trapped by Mr Chris Carter and his colleagues. When members throw out the hook of welfare, those people become fish who have been caught, and they will remain on the Government’s payroll for the rest of their lives. They will tell their kids to do the same, and their grandkids, as well. Of course, National has greater aspirations for those people than the Minister has.

So National supports this bill, and we support it for these two reasons—firstly, to make sure that those in need get what is required and, secondly, to catch the ratbags that the Minister would otherwise hook.

I rise to speak tonight in support of the Housing Restructuring and Tenancy Matters (Information Matching) Amendment Bill. I want to continue on from my colleague talking about the major intent of the amendment before the Committee tonight, which is to enable fraud to be detected by the matching of information. I spoke in the second reading debate, when this bill came back from the Social Services Committee, of an elderly gentleman who had visited me in my office in Gisborne. He was living in a State house and was having difficulty making ends meet. As he lived up on the East Coast, he was in a remote rural area where everything costs more—every time one goes to get fuel or food it costs more. So he was really struggling.

He was a delightful old gentleman and he said to me that he did not want to break the law. He was very grateful for the help the New Zealand taxpayer gives him, but he had the opportunity of having his nephew come and board with him, and that would help him pay the bills. He just wanted to make sure that that was legal. He appreciated the fact that he was in a State house and that he was on an income-related rent, and he wanted to make sure that he was working within the rules. Of course, he was within the rules by having only one person board with him.

This matter occupied the select committee when it tried to determine the lengths that some people will go to in order to get around the law. Looking back, we asked the officials questions about what the difference was between a tenant and a boarder. We also asked, in the light of the proposed information sharing between the Housing New Zealand Corporation and the Ministry of Social Development, whether those agencies would be able to pick up the sort of fraud perpetrated where there might be, for instance, joint tenants—two people in a joint tenancy of a State house. Under an income-related rent, a tenant can have one boarder. Therefore, one person could relinquish his or her tenancy and become a boarder, so that his or her income would not then count towards the income-related rent.

There is no way that this bill will address that sort of fraud. There is just no way that we can design a law that digs into people’s lives as deeply as that. It is a sad indictment on our welfare system that some people will go to such lengths to defraud the taxpayer. Unfortunately, what we are debating tonight cannot go to that level of detail to try to make sure that people are honest, but it can provide the information that will pick up those situations where more than one boarder is living in a State house.

I will just refer to a comment my colleague Phil Heatley made about a State house that might have five, six, or seven boarders. Having operated a private hotel for 6 years, and a bed and breakfast for 4 years, I know that under the laws of this country, if more than three people stay in a bed and breakfast overnight, there is a whole new ramp of fire regulations and health and safety requirements around the way that business operates, because the operator is selling accommodation. Therefore, I ask this Committee what the difference is between operating a bed and breakfast and operating a State house that has four or five boarders. It is dinner, bed, and breakfast at the expense of the taxpayer.

💬 Bob Clarkson: And income tax, as well.

Well, apart from the taxation purposes, there are no health and safety requirements expected of the person who is the tenant of that house and who is, therefore, responsible for the health and safety of the people who are staying in it.

I think that this bill is timely legislation to try to put an end to those sorts of rorts. National did try to bring this legislation in once, and we are very pleased that the Government has now seen sense.

I move, That the question be now put.

Motion agreed to.

Clause 1 agreed to.

The question was put that the amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 38 in the name of the Hon Chris Carter to clause 2 be agreed to.

Amendment agreed to.

Clause 2 as amended agreed to.

Bill reported with amendment.

Report adopted.