Immediate housing need: why disabled people must not be an afterthought
By Bettina Syme, General Manager Northern Region, CCS Disability Action
Published 30 April 2026
The Auditor-General’s new report, Supporting people in immediate housing need, shines a much‑needed light on how the Ministry of Social Development (MSD) and the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development (MHUD) work together to connect people with housing and wrap‑around support. It looks at access, fairness and coordination – the fundamentals of a decent housing system.
But from where we stand at CCS Disability Action, there is a serious gap. Disabled people are part of the “immediate housing need” population, often in highly precarious situations, yet their experiences are largely invisible in this analysis.
What the report does – and doesn’t – look at
The Auditor-General’s team set out to understand how well MSD and MHUD identify people in urgent need, connect them with suitable options, and work with other agencies – including Kāinga Ora (KO) and community housing providers – to find solutions. It examines things like clarity of roles, guidance to staff, information sharing and whether people are receiving consistent, fair treatment.
These are exactly the system settings that determine whether disabled people end up in safe, accessible homes – or stuck in motels, unsafe housing or prolonged homelessness. Yet disability is not treated as a specific lens in the report. The framework is sound, but disabled people’s needs are largely invisible within it.
Disabled people are not a marginal group in housing
Data from the 2023 Household Disability Survey shows that 17% of people in Aotearoa – about one in six New Zealanders – are disabled. Disabled people are more likely to experience housing deprivation and to live in homes that do not meet their accessibility needs. Early analysis also shows that disabled people wait longer on average for public and social housing that has the modifications or features they require, compared to non‑disabled applicants.
In other words, disability should not be treated as a niche issue in immediate housing need. Disabled people are a significant part of the population relying on MSD, MHUD, Kāinga Ora and community housing providers – and when the system fails, the consequences for disabled tenants and their whānau can be severe.
How the system feels from the front line
From our services, we see daily that the housing system has not been designed with disabled people in mind. One disabled colleague summed it up starkly:
MSD, Kāinga Ora and MHUD “don’t communicate” in practice – and sometimes are explicitly not allowed to share information.
People on the Housing Register are not permitted to speak directly to Kāinga Ora until they are offered a house. By then, the property has often been selected with incomplete information about disability and access needs.
If a disabled person turns down a property because it is unsuitable, MSD can, at its discretion, drop them down the list or remove them from the register altogether.
This is not an abstract concern. Our colleague describes being mistakenly removed from the Housing Register twice – the first time without even being told, only discovering it eight months later. Once reinstated, they spent seven months being as proactive as possible and still “got absolutely no closer to being housed”.
At the same time, data released under the Official Information Act shows disabled applicants waiting longer on average than others for social housing, and particularly for modified properties. For people who need accessible or highly adaptable homes, the wait can be significantly longer again because there are so few suitable properties in stock.
Having a high priority rating does not guarantee housing when the underlying problem is a lack of accessible housing supply. From a service delivery perspective, we see people being kept in limbo not because they are “hard to house”, but because the system has not properly counted or planned for accessible homes.
When “immediate need” and disability reality collide
The Auditor-General’s report focuses on people in immediate housing need and emergency housing settings. For disabled people, the rules around “immediacy” can be actively harmful.
Drawing on experience, you cannot discuss emergency housing with MSD until you are one to two days away from homelessness. That might sound administratively tidy, but it is deeply unsafe for many disabled people who rely on equipment, support workers, or specific locations for their daily living.
A non‑disabled person might just about manage a last‑minute move into a motel on the other side of town. A wheelchair user who relies on accessible bathroom facilities, local support, and proximity to health services cannot. Treating everyone as if they have the same flexibility builds discrimination into the system by default.
From my perspective, this is where the gap between the Auditor-General’s system view and disabled people’s lived reality is most stark. The report is asking the right questions about access, fairness and coordination – but without a disability lens, it risks missing how those same processes can systematically disadvantage disabled people.
The stock problem: “any house” versus “the right house”
Geoff Penrose, General Manager for Lifemark puts it bluntly: the deeper you dig into accessible housing, the worse it looks.
Kāinga Ora has a poor and inconsistent understanding of its own stock when it comes to accessibility. Terms like “partial universal design” or “full universal design” are used, but often without clear, standard definitions. In practice, no one really knows what those labels mean at a national scale, and this has been the case for a long time.
This is one reason we have consistently advocated for clear, shared definitions of accessible housing – including through Lifemark standards. There is now a working group tasked with developing and publishing those definitions so Kāinga Ora and others can better categorise and manage its stock. That is a positive step, but until that work is completed and implemented, people are still being offered “accessible” homes that do not actually meet their accessibility needs.
The same is true for many community housing providers who draw from the Housing Register. Their definitions of accessibility can be loose, and in many cases their stock is not meaningfully accessible at all. MHUD has made progress by requiring Lifemark certification or similar for some new builds and actively supporting accessible housing in parts of its programme, which is encouraging.
However, one of MHUD’s key performance metrics remains overall housing availability, not accessible housing availability. If the system rewards “any roof over someone’s head” rather than “the right housing for the person’s needs”, disabled people will continue to be offered unsuitable homes and penalised when they turn them down.
Where Whaikaha fits – and why we should build on, not duplicate, its work
Whaikaha - Ministry of Disabled People has an important role here. One of its actions under the developing disability strategy and housing goal is to obtain and analyse data on housing supply and demand for disabled people in each region. That work is not straightforward, precisely because existing data from MSD, Kāinga Ora, MHUD and housing providers is patchy and inconsistent.
But it is underway. Whaikaha’s housing data work is designed to show where disabled people need housing, what types of housing they need, and how that compares with what is available or being built. It also aims to bring together information on accessible housing features, so there is a more accurate picture of stock.
Given this we should be asking that MSD, MHUD and Kāinga Ora, in responding to the audit’s findings, explicitly connect their improvement work to Whaikaha’s data and the disability strategy housing actions.
What we would like to see next
From CCS Disability Action’s perspective, the Auditor-General’s report is a valuable starting point – but only if disabled people are brought clearly into the next phase of work.
In practical terms, that means:
Explicitly including disabled people in the agencies’ response to the audit. MSD and MHUD should commit to checking how their planned improvements will work for disabled people, using data from Whaikaha and disability organisations rather than assuming a “one size fits all” approach.
Integrating disability into future monitoring and audits. Subsequent reviews of immediate housing need should track disability-specific indicators – for example, average wait times for people needing accessible homes, the number and distribution of accessible properties in stock, and outcomes for disabled applicants who decline unsuitable offers.
Fixing key pain points in information and decision‑making. MSD, Kāinga Ora, MHUD, and Whaikaha should work together with disabled people’s organisations to address practical issues: information sharing between agencies, rules that penalise people for turning down unsuitable housing, and emergency housing thresholds that do not recognise support and accessibility needs.
As a disability organisation working alongside disabled people every day, we welcome the Auditor-General’s focus on how the system serves people in immediate housing need. But until disabled people’s realities are explicitly built into that picture, the system will keep falling short for those who can least afford to wait.
Our message is simple: immediate housing need must include disabled people – not as an afterthought, but as a core part of how we measure success and design solutions.