16 June 2023
Media: Rotorua Daily Post
Topic: Homelessness and consents data
Enquiry
I interviewed the PM when he was in Rotorua yesterday and he made some comments about how the Govt was dealing with homelessness in Rotorua.
Chris Hipkins said:
“We’re working on building more houses because actually, that’s how you deal with the homelessness crisis.”
Hipkins said the Government had been working on building more state housing in Rotorua.
“Already, hundreds have been built and hundreds more are on the way.”
Hipkins said there was currently a “housing boom” in Rotorua shown by the amount of construction taking place in the city.
“Working through the Housing Accord, we’ve seen the number of people in emergency accommodation almost halve. And we’ve got more work to do there but clearly we’re starting to really get to grips with that and get on top of it.”
I found some consent data on page 23 of this council meeting agenda which shows the number of building consents and subdivision consented lots have dropped year on year.
Questions:
Why do you think this has dropped?
What comments would you make in response to Chris Hipkins' comments?
Could you please provide the comparable data on page 23 for the five previous years prior to the July 2021-June 2022 year?
For our own understanding, it would be great to seek clarification on the difference between building consents, dwelling consents and subdivision consented lots.
Response
We provided the following information:
While the graph on page 23 shows that new building consents had gone down in the last three years, the graph on page 25 shows the number of net dwelling in building consents has actually increased year on year since 2016.
The Council has no response to the Prime Minister’s comments.
Council staff will not be able to get you the comparison figures you requested. However, please go to Agendas, Minutes and Presentations - Rotorua Lakes Council on RLC’s website and search for operational reports from previous years. For a comparison April to April go to the June meetings of the Operations & Monitoring Committee meetings. In the June 2022 meeting agenda there will be the same graph as this year but for April 2022 which has a comparison to 2021.
Reporting in years prior to that was different but you can still go to those (go to the June O&M meeting of those years for April reports) if you want to take a look.
Re the figure for this April, as was noted in the meeting, one of those “lots” is an 80-section development but this is not reflected in the figures due to the type of consent that was obtained for this development ie they have what’s called a “land use consent” which means they subdivide later rather than subdividing first and then getting consents per lot.