While we can assume that the broad national trends set out above will also affect Housing New Zealand’s requirements, we need more detailed tenant and asset information to make the right decisions. Housing New Zealand does not currently know much about the disability needs of our tenants and their families/whānau, or people we may provide homes for in the future. While we do already receive data from a number of different sources, it is important to note that no single source of data, or any single dataset, is able to offer a full count of disabled people in New Zealand. Again, this kind of information is about disability categories, not about people’s accessibility needs.
Currently, Housing New Zealand does not have a reliable way to capture and store disability information about our tenants and their household members, or their accessibility needs. In order to better serve our customers’ needs, we need to capture better information that will help us to provide the right properties for people and make better decisions about future needs for our customers.
Housing New Zealand’s internal tenancy management system records disabilities in a variety of locations and based on tenants’ self-reporting. As at 31 May 2019, the following statistics were captured:
- There were 63,545 main tenants and 188,671 household members living in Housing New Zealand homes around the country.
- Of the main tenants, 20,979 have told us they have either a visual (18,606), hearing (606) or other disability (1,767), which we have captured in our system. This equates to 33 percent of all main tenants.
- Of the household members, 48,110 have told us they have either a visual (45,046), hearing (996) or other disability (2,068), which we have captured in our system. This equates to 26 percent of all people living in our homes.
Without relevant and useful information about tenants and their families’ disability needs, and being able to plan for these needs now and in the future, Housing New Zealand may not be designing and building the right kinds of new homes, or adapting existing homes to meet people’s needs.
Housing New Zealand is working to get a better idea of our tenants’ and families’ disability needs through a project using Statistics New Zealand’s Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI) research database. The project aims to identify Housing New Zealand’s customers with diagnosed/confirmed disabilities and gather information including:
- Who – primary tenant and/or household member, age, gender, household type, income source, ethnicity, location.
- Type of disability – hearing, vision, mobility, agility, learning, psychological, speaking, memory etc.
- Services used – what services are used, and how often. Also, if there is a shortfall in the available services, met and unmet need for support and assistive equipment, outcomes and barriers to participation across a range of social and economic activities.
We can already see in some early data from this project that disabled children who live in Housing New Zealand’s homes seem most likely to have some kind of learning disability. For Housing New Zealand’s disabled tenants who are over 40 years old, mobility disabilities seem to be the most common type of disability. We need to make sure we have different and appropriate responses to our customers’ different disability needs. We set out some preliminary findings in Appendix E.
WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT OUR CUSTOMERS’ EXPERIENCES WITH THEIR HOMES?
Another way that Housing New Zealand gathers information about our tenants is through our Tenant Satisfaction Survey. This is a quarterly survey that captures key satisfaction measures for our tenants, including areas like safety, quality of home, level of customer service, and maintenance and repairs. The survey captures a sample of 500 tenants, and each quarter we have the ability to include additional questions on various topics.
In March 2019, we included a set of additional questions that provided insight into tenants’ satisfaction on the topic of accessibility, capturing data on what accessibility means to tenants, if the home meets their accessibility needs, and if tenants live in modified properties. These questions are based on questions in the New Zealand Disability Survey, so will allow comparability. The results from the Tenant Satisfaction Survey are set out below:
- 74 percent of tenants are satisfied that their home currently meets their needs.
- 71 percent of tenants are satisfied that Housing New Zealand understands their needs in their home.
- For 45 percent of tenants, accessibility means ‘Ease of getting in and out of house/property’.
- 11 percent of tenants have needed modifications.
- 50 percent of tenants have been satisfied with these modifications.
- 73 percent of tenants believe their accessibility needs are currently being met.