Legal right to shelter

Press, 2 November 1989, Page 14

Legal right to shelter

THE statutory obligation in Britain to house families gives everyone there a sound basis on which they can require shelter. The Rev. Charles Waldegrave, as a spokesman for the New Zealand Housing Network, makes this response to a question from a correspondent. In a letter to the Editor, Ted Hicks writes: “On September 7 ‘The Press’ printed a news item which stated that the Statistics Department’s recently published report on families and households, based on the census, gives 20,000 individuals, or 9075 households, as being homeless. “Commenting on this, a New Zealand Housing Network spokesman, the Rev. Charles Waldegrave, said in the same item: ‘New Zealand should recognise shelter was a human right by writing this into the statute books, as other countries have done.’ I would like to ask Mr Waldegrave how many countries with such laws have solved the problem of finding housing for their homeless people, and how many have not?” Mr Waldegrave replies:

correct figure for homeless families in New Zealand is probably around the 20,000 mark. “Britain is a country which has had a statutory obligation to house all homeless for more than a decade now. It is from there that we have the most documented evidence of the effects of this law. “We should note that the law, in itself, has not totally solved the problem of homelessness in Britain. We must take into account that there they have a population of 60M people with less land than we have available in this country. They have also, in this decade, created one of the largest unemployment rates in any O.E.C.D. country. In some cities in the north of England unemployment levels were in excess of 40 per cent. “Mrs Thatcher’s Government, which has been in office now for more than a decade, has dismantled an incredible amount of social legislation. It has not dared to remove the statutory obligation to house all people because of the way it is viewed by the public in Britain. “The management of the law to house all people has not been helpfully administered by the bureaucracy. New Zealand need not go through the same processes. For example, the law referred only to housing families, and this created a crisis for single people. Authorities found a way of saying that some people were intentionally homeless, and in certain areas this was used to reduce housing waiting lists. “Housing workers in Britain, as opposed to the Government departments that serve their current Conservative Government,

"We should note that the figures to which Mr Hicks refers concern only those who live in makeshift accommodation. They do not refer to the levels of homelessness in New Zealand. Since the 1986 census, the New Zealand Housing Commission has carried out a study on the levels of homelessness in New Zealand and estimates that 70,000 individuals and in excess of 17,500 families in the areas of the country it studied are homeless. It did not study all areas of New Zealand. Informally, it has agreed with the Network that the

ail agree that the statutory obligation to house families has greatly improved the access to housing for low-income families. Like health services and benefits in this country, it does not work for everyone, but it gives all a sound basis on which they can require adequate shelter. It has enabled community groups and public opinion to haye strong negotiating power in their advocacy of low-income families.

“Some media accounts have sensationalised a local authority in Britain for putting families up in bed-and-breakfast accommodation when it did not have enough houses to go around. They have also stated that the quality of accominodation in some State houses is too low. “There is no need for these problems to be repeated in New Zealand. Our population and, therefore, numbers of homeless, are much less. The standard of our accommodation with the Housing Corporation is, generally speaking, quite high. Furthermore, the New Zealand Housing Network has always said that the law needed to be passed allowing a five-year period for sufficient houses to be built to make its implementation possible.

“I ask Mr Hicks to consider the alternative which we are currently lumbered with; that governments can sell off housing at their whim. This capital stock is very tempting when there are problems meeting national budgets. The biggest sufferers are innocent children who are brought up in total insecurity with little chance of ever inheriting the things we all hope New Zealand children can participate in as of right.”