Simeon Brown identifies a sign. Via Instagram

PoliticsAugust 2, 2024

‘Unjust and unethical’: The scrap over speed reductions, explained

Editor-at-large

Simeon Brown identifies a sign. Via Instagram

Public health academics and other experts are queuing up to condemn Simeon Brown’s plan to remove blanket speed cuts. Why?

What’s the latest?

In an editorial this morning published by the New Zealand Medical Journal, a group of five health experts argue that the overwhelming body of evidence stands in profound opposition to plans to reverse blanket speed reductions.

OK, interesting. Just how fast can blankets travel?

No. Blanket as in across-the-board. Under the previous government there had been a broad push towards reducing speed limits.

The Labour government’s Road to Zero strategy paved the way for reducing maximum speeds on selected state highways (although Chris Hipkins as prime minister did scramble to throw some of these plans on his last-gasp proverbial bonfire), while local authorities moved to cut speed limits in urban areas.

And then what?

National pledged to throw this particular policy wagon into reverse. It won the election and so it’s doing just that.

What will change?

As drafted, the Land Transport Rule will reverse all speed limit reductions introduced since the start of 2020 on local streets, arterial roads, and state highways.

What about speed reductions around schools?

Where permanent reductions have been increased they’ll be changed to variable status, reduced only for drop-off and pick-up hours. Streets outside a school will be 30km/h “during school travel times”. Rural roads outside schools will need to have speed limits during those hours of 60km/h or less.

What’s the rationale for the policy?

Speed reductions introduced by the last government were guilty of “ignoring economic impacts including travel times, and giving insufficient weight to road users’ and local communities’ views”, declared National’s “Accelerate NZ” policy ahead of the last election. It pledged to “return many state highways to 100 km/h from 80, and many local roads to 50 km/h from 30, while designing new highways for 110 km/h”.

The policy surfaced again in the National-Act coalition deal, as “reverse speed limit reductions where it is safe to do so”, into the 100-day plan as “stopping blanket speed limit reductions” and into the “Q3 action plan”, which takes us to the end of September, in a commitment to “sign the new speed limit rule to reverse the previous government’s blanket speed limit reductions”.

And Act’s position?

Per a recent edition of Free Press, the Act newsletter: “Few things summed up Ardernism better than making us all drive comically slowly based on no evidence.”

No evidence?

A convoy of academics say there’s plenty. In an editorial in the NZ Medical Journal this morning, headlined “Speeding towards danger”, Christopher Wakeman, a leading trauma surgeon based at the Department of Surgery at the University of Otago in Christchurch, along with four other health experts, survey the available research from around the world and conclude: “There is little doubt that increasing maximum speeds will lead to more lives being lost on our roads.”

They argue that any economic benefits that might result from an increase in speed limits would be outweighed by “the costs associated with the potential increase in deaths, injuries and negative health outcomes”.

And: “It seems that increasing maximum driving speeds has been prioritised over all other considerations, which does not reflect the balance needed for responsible decision-making about our transport system. And it flies in the face of best practice in road safety based on global evidence … To prioritise opportunities for motorists to drive at pace ahead of conditions that protect opportunities for active travel and safety of non-motorists is inherently unjust and unethical.”

Anything else?

The authors say that impacts fall inequitably. “It is well established that pedestrian and road injury risks are disproportionately borne by tamariki Māori and Pacific children, older people, disabled people, rural communities and residents of socio-economically disadvantaged urban neighbourhoods. Many of these groups have lower access to cars but are more likely to be injured by them. They are also more likely to face severe and disabling consequences, with higher out-of-pocket expenses and many unmet needs alongside barriers to accessing care. Therefore, the proposed policies are most likely to be injured by them.”

Any other objectors?

Simon Kingham, a Canterbury professor who also served until recently as the Ministry of Transport chief science adviser, has deplored “bizarre” and “madness” plans, which rest, he says, on a “complete lack of evidence”.

In a paper co-written with population health academic Angela Curl, Kingham points to “significant and wide-ranging” health impacts and environmental damage, while questioning whether time savings are meaningful.

In January, the NZ Trauma Committee of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons wrote to the government to “urgently appeal for the maintenance of reduced speed limits on Aotearoa New Zealand’s roads”, pointing to local research that “has consistently shown that reducing speed limits significantly reduces the risk of death and serious injury in road accidents”.

How have local authorities responded?

There’s been some pushback, not least from the local body Leviathan, Auckland. The Brown v Brown standoff came as the Super City council voted 18-3 to oppose the plan to reverse speed limit reductions. The council voted by 12-1 to oppose the variable speed limit plan for schools.

Permanent speed reductions around schools are backed by 78% of school leaders.

Were members of the public consulted?

Yes. A consultation process ran for four weeks up to July 11. Simeon Brown came in for criticism from the opposition for an email to supporters urging them to click on a link to submit on the consultation and “make your voice heard to reverse Labour’s blanket speed limit reductions across the country”. In the email Brown noted that the Greens were asking their supporters to submit.

What does the minister say to his critics?

Asked for a response to the the NZ Medical Journal article, Simeon Brown stressed that the government had won a mandate for the policy, adding: “The highest-income countries that have the lowest rates of road deaths – Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Japan, Denmark, UK – all have default speed limits of 50 kph or more on urban roads, with exceptions for lower speed limits. Our government’s approach is aligned with this.”

He said: “These countries have strong road safety records, targeting alcohol, drugs, and speeding. Our government has introduced legislation to roll out roadside drug testing. We are setting targets for police to undertake at least 3.3 million alcohol breath tests per year, and we are directing investment towards road policing and enforcement. We are prioritising the safety of young New Zealanders by requiring variable speed limits outside schools during pick-up and drop-off times. It makes no sense at all to make a shift worker heading to work at 4am crawl along at 30 kph with a permanent speed limit reduction.”

Keep going!

Image: Getty Images/The Spinoff

OPINIONPoliticsAugust 1, 2024

Healthy homes standards worked, but many landlords are still refusing to comply

Max Rashbrooke

Contributing writer

Image: Getty Images/The Spinoff

Data released under the Official Information Act shows more rentals are now up to Healthy Homes Standards, but those that aren’t are getting away with it.

Amidst the generalised despair about the last government’s failure to deliver on certain key promises, it’s easy to forget it had some major wins.

Take, for instance, the healthy homes standards, introduced in 2019 in an attempt to do something about the extravagantly bad quality of this country’s rental housing – something that consistently makes overseas observers shake their heads in bafflement. The standards are not especially demanding. They require only that a rental property has a fixed source of heating, is insulated where practicable, has extractor fans in both bathroom and kitchen, boasts functioning water pipes and gutters, and does not have massive holes in its walls. These are not, on any objective measure, unreasonable demands, even if some landlords treated the law change like they would a declaration of war.

But have the standards made any difference? Although objective data is in short supply, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development does commission an annual survey of renters and landlords, the 2024 edition of which has been released to the Spinoff under the Official Information Act.

The survey reveals some good news. Nearly one-fifth of rental owners say they were compliant with the standards even before they were introduced; taken at face value, these are the good landlords, of which the country needs a far larger supply.

Even more pleasingly, the data suggest the standards have made a substantial difference. Some 84% of renters say their property has an “acceptable” form of heating installed (heat pumps, for the most part), up from 67% in 2020. Similarly, 77% of renters say they can heat their living room to a “comfortable” temperature all year round, up from 50% in 2020.

Perhaps most tellingly, the proportion of renters saying their home has a problem with damp or mould has fallen from 57% in 2021 to 44% today. The proportion citing problems with heating their home or keeping warm in winter has likewise fallen, from 55% to 42%.

When it comes to ventilation, 79% of renters report their property has an extractor fan in good working order in the bathroom, up from 64% in 2020. Similarly, 81% say there is a fan in the kitchen, up from 66%.

These marked improvements since 2020 plausibly tell us two things. One, the standards have begun to work. This is reassuring: it shows us that when the state does something, when regulation is enacted, improvements follow. Second, if there is to be further progress, it will come once again from regulation: the “market” so beloved of neoclassical economists had decades to raise rental standards to an acceptable level, and failed abysmally.

We are, as a result, only at base camp on the mountain of rental reform. Recall that around four in 10 rentals, according to their occupants, are still to some extent damp, mouldy or difficult to heat. Within that, 6-8% have a “major” problem with mould and cold. On one measure, this proportion has not changed since 2020.

Likewise the situation with drainage. According to renters, roughly one-fifth of properties have unresolved drainage issues; within that, 10% of renters are not aware that their landlord has any immediate plans to fix the problem.

We can also take that staple of low-grade New Zealand rental housing, the gaping hole in the wall. Just under a quarter of renters report their properties have “unreasonable” gaps and holes that cause “noticeable” draughts. Within that, in 14% of cases their landlord has no apparent plan to address the issue. Some 15-18% of rentals, meanwhile, have no appropriate source of heating, depending on whether one believes renters or landlords.

Most concerning, when landlords are asked whether they have prepared their properties to meet the Healthy Homes Standards, around 8% still say “no, not really” or “not yet”. Similarly, around 7% of landlords are officially described as being “in denial” about the legally mandated standards, a figure that is unchanged since 2020.

What does all this tell this? If we take the issues with dampness, heating and drainage, roughly 20-40% of rentals – that is, hundreds of thousands of properties – still display some level of defects. Within this, somewhere between 8% and 15% of rentals are extremely damp, mouldy or otherwise unsafe, and their landlords are utterly unrepentant.

Why have such problems not been regulated out of existence? A clue may lie in the inspection regime. Labour is to be saluted for one epochal shift: rather than requiring tenants to report problems, as was previously the case, Jacinda Ardern’s government gave officials the power to proactively launch investigations.

It did not, though, support this shift with sufficient resources. Two years ago, the inspectorate tasked with assessing New Zealand’s 600,000-odd rental properties boasted a grand total of 37 staff. In response to the Spinoff’s enquiries, the Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) has revealed that the number today stands at … 35.

This inspectorate, MBIE insists, has not been harmed by the new government’s cost-cutting regime, nor has it been instructed to dial down its regulatory efforts. But National hardly need do so.

Even under Labour, the rental inspectorate spent an awful lot of time “educating” landlords about the standards set out in law and very little time actually – you know – enforcing them. In the last year, rental inspectors issued 316 warnings, but took just four landlords to the Tenancy Tribunal. The result – as the survey shows – is that the very worst landlords continue to flout the law, safe in the knowledge that they are extremely unlikely to be prosecuted.

Little change can be expected from the current government. But while they are in opposition, Labour and the Greens should draw up plans for another, more comprehensive, phase of regulation. The slumlords deserve no second chances, no first warnings. One or two of them need to be put out of business, and their properties snapped up by better owners. Only then will the remaining slumlords be frightened into compliance; only then will the nirvana that most developed countries have long since achieved – a stock of predominantly warm and safe rental homes – come finally within reach.