Fixing our unhealthy homes brings a wealth of benefits for New Zealanders. It gives families cosy, snug places to build memories. It means homes need less energy to maintain a warm, healthy temperature, helping to drive down energy bills – especially relevant with all the talk around the rising costs of living – and reducing the storm-causing pollution which puts so many of our homes on the climate change frontline. Warm, healthy homes also help to tackle respiratory sickness, keeping our children out of hospital, and reducing the pressure on our health system.

It’s a popular move too, this year an unprecedented, vast housing alliance of over 160 organisations is calling on political parties to make a make a promise to introduce a pollution-busting home reno programme. This huge alliance is clearly having an effect, as we have seen in today’s announcement.

We know tackling damp, cold, inefficient homes is a no brainer. Polling has shown that improving the state of homes could be enough to swing over a million votes. It makes sense economically too, with research finding a large programme to fix up New Zealand homes could benefit our economy to the tune of billions and billions of dollars.

That same research has shown that a pilot programme, like the one announced today, is a vital first step to learn from, before rolling out a much-needed ambitious programme for hundreds of thousands of homes. This looks very much the case here, and this pilot should be the precursor to a much larger, much needed, pollution busting home reno programme.

If political parties are serious about tackling the costs of living, driving down household bills, delivering warm, cosy homes, keeping children out of hospital, tackling climate change, introducing a popular policy, and benefitting the economy, then an ambitious home reno programme is the way to do it. It’s great to see this issue now being taken on in this election. We welcome this announcement today.

It’s high time all political parties get involved and make some similar promises. Political parties need policies to ramp up improving kiwi homes significantly more than the current regime. Without this they are leaving hundreds of thousands of homes unhealthy, with high bills and we are missing a major opportunity to decarbonise NZ and provide real economic benefits.

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