Hon Dr Ayesha Verrall

Associate Minister of Health

Hon Aupito William Sio

Associate Minister of Health

More than 31,000 children, pregnant people and 111,000 of their family members are warmer and healthier thanks to the Healthy Homes Initiative according to the latest three-year evaluation report released today.

The Healthy Homes Initiative has delivered over 100,000 interventions – providing education, beds and bedding, curtains, housing relocation, and heating to those who need it most. The Government recently expanded the scheme to cover the whole country by the end of the year.

“It is our belief as a Government that everyone deserves a warm, dry, healthy home,” Associate Minister of Health Ayesha Verrall said.

“Poor housing stock can make people sick and by improving housing conditions, people are healthier and more likely to stay in school or in work, while also relieving pressure on the health system.

“These results support our decision to expand the programme to nationwide coverage. We inherited a programme that was underfunded and narrowly targeted. We’ve invested $30 million in the initiative and in Budget 22 funded its extension to the whole country.

“We anticipate that this expansion can extend the benefits of the programme to a large number of people across the whole country.

“This is an example of our wellbeing investment working. Programmes like this are improving the health and wellbeing of New Zealanders and are a key component of our plan to make New Zealand the best place in the world to be a child,” Ayesha Verrall said.

Initially, the programme targeted low-income families with children at risk of rheumatic fever, but was expanded to focus on families with children aged up to 5 and pregnant women, and recently rolled-out to the rest of the country.

Associate Minister of Health Aupito William Sio said the Healthy Homes Initiative had made a huge impact on the health and wellbeing of over 31,000 tamariki/hapū māmā and over 111,000 members of their whānau/aiga.

“It’s significant that 94 percent of referrals identify as Māori or Pacific. Many in our communities live in multi-generational households and have multiple health conditions,” Minister Sio said.

The programme is part of the Government’s wider housing programme which includes major investment in rebuilding the public housing sector (10,000 additional homes and counting), retrofitting state houses to bring them up to standard and billions of dollars for critical housing infrastructure.

Notes for Editors:

· HHI is currently in 11 regions with six further regions coming on board in October and the remaining three are planned to be operating by the end of the year.

· The report is available on the Te Whatu Ora website: https://www.tewhatuora.govt.nz/keeping-well/healthy-homes-initiative

· The evaluation was funded by the Ministry of Health (now Te Whatu Ora – Health New Zealand) and the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development, and Kāinga Ora – Homes and Communities. The evaluation lead He Kāinga Oranga (University of Otago in Wellington) and MOTU.

· These results are not official statistics. They have been created for research purposes from the Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI) which is managed by Stats NZ. For more information about the IDI, please visit https://www.stats.govt.nz/integrated-data/

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