Providing housing assistance
Many of the pressures in housing are caused by unaffordability as well as supply constraints, and there is no quick fix for this. We provide services that are aimed at addressing people’s more immediate housing needs, and we need to do this as well as we can. We are focusing on our impact of reducing the number of people in insecure housing through:
- working with the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development (MHUD) to establish a national homelessness strategy – a cross-government multiagency initiative to prevent or minimise homelessness in New Zealand
- adapting our approach to ensure our clients receive the right support at the right time, through the best channels.
In October 2018 MHUD took over many of the public and transitional housing functions that we had previously been performing. However, we continue to play a key role in providing access to housing support through our service and contact centres, by:
- assessing eligibility for public housing
- managing the public housing register
- enabling people to access emergency accommodation and a number of other forms of housing assistance.
We provide these services to people who are either existing public housing tenants or on the public housing register, or who could remain in their home with some assistance, and by doing so we aim to address barriers to accessing or retaining a home.
In recognition of increased demand for public and transitional housing, we have obtained funding for intensive case management and Navigator services, support services for families with children in transitional housing and those with identified mental health needs, and flexible funding to support families to meet needs that cannot be addressed by existing products and services.
There are still some areas, such as responsibility for the management of transitional housing contracts, for which ongoing responsibilities between MSD and MHUD are still being finalised. The transitional arrangements have been extended to 30 June 2020.
MHUD remains reliant on MSD for data on the Public Housing Register and housing support assistance.
