The Salvation Army is ruling out the purchase of state-owned social housing stock saying buying the properties would stretch its resources too far, Radio New Zealand reports.
The Government plans to sell up to 8000 state houses to community groups by 2017 and up to 2000 of them this year alone.
The Salvation Army, which owns more than 400 rental houses, mainly for the elderly, was tagged as a likely buyer, however, the group's social housing spokesman Campbell Roberts said their own research proved the transfer would be too complex, and running the properties too difficult.
“We would be faced with significant maintenance issues, houses which have got the wrong tenants ... we would also need to do extensive development,” he said.
“We would be putting so much resource into this that we could not actually put resource into anything else.”
Labour Party leader Andrew Little said the Government would have to go back to the drawing board, and he said he suspected the starting point would be for the Government to turn back to Housing New Zealand and tell it to do its job properly.
Green Party housing spokesperson Kevin Hague said the decision left the Government's social housing policy in tatters.
“Every second sentence that a minister has uttered about his policy has included the Salvation Army. They're clearly the lead social agency that the Government hoped to have involved.”
However Finance and Housing New Zealand Minister Bill English told Morning Report the Government was still working with the community housing sector and the Salvation Army's decision did not jeopardise the sale programme.
