Healthy Housing organisations commit to ending cold, damp housing in the Wellington region
The Wellington Healthy Housing Regional Response Group met on Thursday 4 October, at the Lower Hutt Events Centre, to sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the vision that ‘Everyone living in the Wellington region lives in warm, dry and safe housing by 2025’.
Made up of central government departments, local councils and district health boards, as well as research, health, social outreach and community organisations and chaired by Cr Chris Laidlaw (Chair of Greater Wellington Regional Council), the Group has been meeting since July 2017 and working on the collective MoU.
The MoU describes a shared commitment to the vision and tasks the Group with delivering practical interventions to improve housing quality, reduce energy hardship, and increase healthy housing literacy for tenants, landlords and homeowners.
Sustainability Trusts’ Chief Executive Phil Squire says, “We believe everyone deserves to live in a healthy home that is warm, dry and safe and want to ensure the Wellington region is leading New Zealand in this vision. We have a tremendous amount of expertise and passion in the organisations represented and will be leveraging this experience to make a real impact in the region over the coming years.”
One of the first projects the Group is undertaking is a stocktake of regional housing quality, interventions, programmes and needs to provide a baseline for measuring the Group’s impact over the next seven years. A smaller working group will be meeting in early November to develop and implement a number of early projects. These may include targeting high-decile suburbs in the region with insulation and heating programmes as well as targeted home assessments and assistance with household energy costs.
