Making housing healthy under the Healthy Homes Initiative meant fewer GP visits and fewer admissions to hospital for children and fewer medicines dispensed.

Not only should housing be required to meet minimum standards, tested to be compliant for health and safety, but many more affordable housing options need to be provided.

“We urgently need a greater number of state homes, and we need more solutions to housing across the board.”

CPAG recommends removing the Accommodation Supplement for around 250,000 families because the payment is overly complex and poorly designed.

Child Poverty Action Group cautiously welcomes the government’s response to the Tax Working Group’s final report.

“Those struggling to raise the next generation in the toughest of conditions should not miss out on future retirement subsidies that others receive exclusively.”

The scope proposed in this review really only considers the question of tenure security and then not in a particularly comprehensive way.

The Salvation Army’s focus on a “KiwiBuy” scheme is an effective approach to ensuring that more people have access to stable and secure housing.

CPAG urges Government to redouble its KiwiBuild efforts and to commit more money to building state housing in response to this shortage.

As a country we should see that every every Kiwi child has the right to live in a home which is warm, safe and secure.

Childhood illnesses, transience and a disastrous rate of homelessness in New Zealand are attributable to a desperate lack of housing required to meet the needs of a growing population.

Vastly improving legislation around the quality and safety of rental homes is imperative if the wellbeing of children is to improve.

Families are living in substandard housing that is causing alarming rates of illness, particularly among young children, and many do not have a home at all.

A deeper look at the tragic reality for many renting in New Zealand, that houses are often not maintained to a standard that is healthy and safe, leading the way to prolonged illness among tenants.

Each year, there are around 40,000 hospital admissions in New Zealand of children who have preventable illnesses that are linked to poverty.

Our most vulnerable children are being failed by poor policies on housing and the evidence that a much more elaborate response is needed is stacking up.

“A comprehensive approach to supporting families needs to be developed across a range of fields. The narrow current social investment approach will not do that.”

Homelessness cannot be allowed to become the status quo and it is important that policy change remains on the public and political agenda. More must be done.

Promises of a few hundred additional social housing units in a few years time have been vague at best.

While it is a good thing that homeless families are being helped financially when they need it the most, emergency grants are not a long-term solution.

There has been no notable improvement for children in poverty over the past decade, and it is imperative that significant extra funding be directed to improving outcomes.