About CHRA
We provide an assurance to the Government that registered community housing providers (CHPs) are well-governed, financially viable, and delivering appropriate long-term housing services to their tenants.
Our role is to register CHPs who meet the eligibility criteria and the performance standards. Once registered, we monitor CHPs performance and may also step in if they don’t continue to meet the performance standards. Our focus is on social and affordable rental provision but consider the CHPs operations as a whole when determining compliance with the performance standards.
Registered CHPs are eligible to enter into an income-related rent subsidy (IRRS) contract with Te Tūāpapa Kura Kāinga – Ministry of Housing and Urban Development (the Ministry), to house people from the Housing Register. Please note that there is no guarantee that a registered CHP will receive IRRS funding. All IRRS contracts are at the discretion of the Ministry’s Housing and Support team (the Ministry team that fund CHPs).
Our regulatory responsibilities
Register
We work with CHPs by:
- assessing applications and register organisations that meet the eligibility criteria and demonstrate they meet the performance standards
- maintaining a record of registered CHPs that is accessible to the public.
Monitoring
We assess CHPs’ ability to maintain registration by:
- monitor ongoing compliance against the performance standards through an annual monitoring programme
- holding online meetings with individual CHPs throughout the year to better understand their operations
- engaging with CHPs, as and when needed, including if a potential breach of the performance standards is identified.
Oversight
We help to identify potential risks to delivering effective housing services by:
- registering organisations with sound governance, management, financial viability, tenancy management and property/asset management policies and processes
- monitoring ongoing compliance against the performance standards
- providing advice on matters such as legislative changes and how to meet the performance standards
- investigating complaints involving registered CHPs
- suspending or revoking registration when a CHP no longer meets the eligibility criteria or is failing to meet one or more of the performance standards.
Our approach
We apply the following principles when assessing an organisation’s application for registration and ongoing compliance with the performance standards:
- Fairness and consistency
We have fair, clear and open processes and our decisions will be made in an unbiased and consistent manner - Proportionality
We consider the level of risk CHPs and their tenants are exposed to, including size, scale, location and experience in carrying out regulated activities - Transparency
We collect, use and share information consistent with the Ministry’s transparency statement.
Transparency statement(external link)
Outside our scope
The following matters are outside our scope of work:
- disputes between landlords and tenants, and other issues relating to the tenancy itself. Tenancy Services provide some useful information on their disputes page(external link).
- complaint hearing and intervention powers under the Residential Tenancies Act 1986, such as landlord and tenant disputes and tenancy protection. The Tenancy Tribunal can assist tenants and landlords to solve disputes they may be unable to resolve between themselves. Tenancy Services(external link)
- statutory powers relating to CHPs under other legislation, such as the Charities Act 2005, the Building Act 2004.
We can only investigate complaints that breach other legislation if the complaint has resulted in a registered CHP failing to meet the eligibility criteria, performance standards, or both.