Housing Minister Chris Bishop’s speech to Community Housing Providers today should have been titled ‘we want you to build houses, but we refuse to spend money so you’re on your own’.

“Chris Bishop is all talk when it comes to housing. It was hoped that in his speech there would’ve been government support for desperately needed public housing," Labour’s housing spokesperson Kieran McAnulty said.

“Instead, there was no commitment to build any more public homes, no further support for the community housing providers and no increases to Income Related Rent Subsidies.

“Everyone was hoping the government would at least announce it would guarantee loans for the newly established community housing funding agency to make them cheaper. But again, no commitment from the Minister.

“Labour delivered more than 14,000 public homes over the six years we were in government, alongside the community housing sector. What have we seen from National so far? Auckland set to lose 199 public homes and Canterbury set to lose nearly 100.

“This is what happens when you cancel projects and pause hundreds of others. We can’t forget the last National Government ended up with 1,500 fewer public homes than it started with and sucked out $576 million in dividends from Housing New Zealand.

“If National delivered additional homes at the rate Labour did, we would become much closer to solving the housing crisis.

“And in a cover up to stop the problem looking like it is growing, the Government’s solution is to change the rules for emergency housing and stop people from even being able to go on the waiting list. For Chris Bishop to say they are ending the emergency housing crisis is disingenuous.

“They are taking us backwards and choosing to make people homeless instead of investing in assets that will provide warm dry homes” Kieran McAnulty said.

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