What commitments does your party have to only build efficient, sustainable new houses, to raise the standards for retrofitting houses to ensure the wellbeing of those living in them, and to bring current housing up to this level?

National

Our policy has yet to be released but will be closer to the election.

Labour

Labour is making sure every New Zealander has a warm, dry, safe place to call home – whether they rent or own. While there’s no silver bullet to solve the long-term challenge that is the housing crisis, we’re making good progress and will continue roll out our plan.

We’ve delivered the biggest increase to public housing in nearly 20 years, and more and more homes are being designed and built to modern standards including double glazing, insulation, and affordable heating such as heat pumps. Under our Government, Kāinga Ora has committed that all of its new homes will be built to a 6 Homestar standard. And, through our Retrofit programme, we’re investing significantly to upgrade and renew older state homes; making them warmer, drier and healthier for tenants.

Greens

Everyone has the right to a warm, dry home. Instead, housing in Aotearoa often makes us sick from damp and cold. Cold, draughty houses with high heating costs can and should be a thing of the past. The Green Party has been committed to warming up our homes for decades, working with both Labour and National governments to deliver subsidies for home insulation. This term, with the Green Party in Government, we’ve introduced Healthy Home Standards for rental properties, requiring insulation and reliable heating. We’ve made sure all new Kāinga Ora public homes are energy efficient and we’ve launched the Building for Climate Change programme to improve how we build while reducing carbon emissions. It’s now time to go further and create a green building revolution, for the health of people and planet. The Green Party will:

• Overhaul the Building Code so all new homes are built to high standards of warmth, dryness, and energy and water efficiency, working towards net zero energy new builds by 2030. The new Code will require new builds to use greywater recycling and be accessible to people with disabilities.
• Provide grants to insulate, heat, and ventilate older homes, targeted at those most in need.
• Introduce mandatory energy efficiency ratings for all commercial and residential buildings, both new and existing.
• Create a Rental Warrant of Fitness to complement the existing Healthy Home Standards, including extending the requirement to be able to heat living rooms to 18C to also apply to bedrooms, so all tenants can have confidence in the warmth of rental properties.
• Kick-start Aotearoa’s sustainable building materials industry, with a particular focus on scaling up sustainable timber processing and prefabricated buildings.
• Finance clean energy replacements of fossil fuel heating systems in commercial and industrial buildings.
• Support green roofs and other “soft” infrastructure.
• Ensure new government buildings are built to high environmental standards.