The Spinoff: How effective have the healthy homes standards really been?

Read the original article in the Spinoff

Before Aisling* moved into her Cuba Street rental in April this year, she’d never had respiratory issues. But a few weeks ago, after a winter of sleeping in a room where the mould just kept coming back, she ended up in Wellington’s urgent care medical centre. “I couldn’t take a proper breath at all,” she says. 

The doctors gave Aisling a steroid inhaler and some antibiotics, and told her the breathing problems were “probably to do with the room”. Hers was an internal bedroom, somehow colder even than the nearby corridor, its gloom leavened only by a dusty old fan and a window letting onto another one of the rooms. Every week she’d wipe down the wall behind her bed, and liberally apply Damp Rid, but “no matter how much I cleaned it, there was still mould”.

Not helping matters were two slow leaks, one in the next-door bedroom and another in the bathroom upstairs. Her landlord said neither could be fixed – but did send the flatmates an email telling them not to dry clothes inside. 

At $200 per week, the room was, by Wellington standards, relatively cheap. “But just because it’s cheap, it shouldn’t be at the expense of your health,” Aisling says. 

Such grim experiences were supposed to have been banished by the 2019 healthy homes standards, which require landlords to install a fixed source of heating, insulate homes where practicable, put extractor fans in both bathroom and kitchen, maintain water pipes in good order, and fix any large holes in the walls. But what difference have the standards actually made? 

The best evidence of their effectiveness – or otherwise – comes from an annual survey of renters and landlords commissioned by the Ministry for Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Whereas previous surveys were run in spring or summer, this year’s survey was, for whatever reason, conducted in winter, rendering it only partially comparable. 

Nonetheless, it provides important insights. And on the surface, compliance with the healthy homes standards is improving. The proportion of landlords HUD rates as “strongly committed” to the standards has risen from 39% in 2020 to 54% this year. 

In 2020, just 64% of renters reported having a bathroom fan in good order, but that figure is now 84%. The proportion reporting their house has at least one kind of acceptable heating has gone from 67% to 88%. And the proportion who say the living room can be brought up to a comfortable temperature “if I turn the heating on” has risen from 50% to 81%.

These, however, are measures of what might be termed outputs: objects delivered. What about the actual outcomes – individuals’ experiences of living in a rental property? On that score, sadly, matters look less promising.

For all that there is better heating, only two-thirds of renters use it regularly during cold winter weather, the same as in 2020. Dampness and mould, meanwhile, had been declining: from 47% of renters reporting issues in 2020, the figure was down to 38% last year. But it was back up to 45% in 2025. This may result from the latest survey’s being run in winter – but still suggests half of New Zealand’s rentals are unacceptably damp.

Elsewhere, the proportion of properties with unresolved drainage issues has actually increased in the last five years, from 18% to 22%, according to renters. Similarly, 25% of renters report their property has “unreasonable gaps or holes”, up from 22% in 2020.

How to explain this discrepancy between outputs and outcomes? Three answers suggest themselves. The first is that the standards have not addressed some fundamental problems. Far more properties may have heat pumps – but while electricity prices remain sky-high, and warmth continues to leak from uninsulated rooms, many tenants can’t afford to use them.

Second, a hard core of bad landlords remains undisturbed. According to HUD, 6% of landlords, owning potentially thousands of properties, are “in denial” about the standards. This may be the same 5-7% of landlords who boldly told the survey that it is physically possible to insulate their properties’ ceilings and floors – but they have refused to do so. 

The third, and most troubling, explanation is that enforcement of the standards remains weak. Labour did introduce one potentially consequential innovation: rather than wait for tenants to complain (and potentially face a revenge eviction), government agencies can mount proactive inspections.

Unfortunately, the nation’s 600,000 rentals are being investigated by just 35 inspectors – a workload of a mere 17,000 properties each. Last year fewer than 1,000 “interventions” by inspectors concerned a breach of the healthy homes standards, and most resulted in relatively inconsequential “warnings”. Just nine produced a Tenancy Tribunal outcome. For context, there are probably individual Wellington streets that boast more than nine fundamentally unsound properties.

Such failings are exacerbated by a flaw in the legislation every bit as large as the gaping holes still found in some rentals: literally anyone can issue a certificate saying a property complies with the standards. A third-party firm can set itself up as “a healthy homes assessor” without the phrase meaning anything. Landlords can self-certify.

All of which suggests tougher regulation may be needed. That could involve accreditation of those issuing the compliance certificates, requiring them to pass some kind of exam and meet basic integrity standards, or the introduction of a vehicle-style warrant of fitness. 

Under the latter scheme, rental quality would be rigorously inspected, on a regular basis, by the government or trusted third parties. This might be accompanied by stronger punishments – a fine sufficient to put the worst landlords out of business, rather than a polite warning. 

Absent this kind of stiffening of regulatory intent, situations like Aisling’s are liable to recur. Since her trip to urgent care, and with the arrival of summer, her breathing problems have eased. Understandably, though, she doesn’t fancy another winter of mould, and is dealing with the issue in the time-honoured Kiwi manner: looking for another flat.