Watch live: Government announces pet bonds

Housing Minister Chris Bishop and Regulation Minister David Seymour will shortly announce a policy to introduce “pet bonds”, which they hope will make it easier for people with pets to find rental accommodation.

A pet bond works like an ordinary rental bond. Money is handed over at the start of a tenancy and if the pet causes damage during the tenancy, that money is used to cover the cost of repair and remediation.

Details of the scheme will be announced shortly, including whether the likes of Tenancy Services, which is responsible for holding ordinary bonds, would also hold pet bonds.

Act campaigned on introducing pet bonds during the campaign. The Act policy would allow landlords to charge a higher bond than the usual maximum of four weeks’ worth of rent to cover for damage caused by pets.

The Government last week announced changes to make it easier to evict tenants. It hopes the policy will improve the rental situation by encouraging more investment in residential rentals. However Government officials were sceptical, with a Regulatory Impact Statement sounding notes of scepticism.

The big change is allowing the return on no-cause evictions.

Bishop said those changes would roll back a “war on landlords” waged by the former government.

“Many landlords told us this caused them to exit the rental market altogether,” Bishop said.

Labour’s housing spokesman Kieran McAnulty said the changes were “same old, same old from National.

“These changes alongside bringing back interest deductability will make it harder for renters and first home buyers. Nothing tangible that will see more houses built, just increasing the competition on existing housing stock instead of building more homes,” McAnulty said.

The Green Party’s Housing spokeswoman Tamatha Paul said the changes would mean “a lot of people will be getting kicked out of their homes for unfair reasons.

“It reinforces to renters that the homes that they’re living in are not theirs, that it’s not their home and it reminds them that they’re living in somebody else’s house all the time,” Paul said.