5. The Right to a Decent Home: How to Measure Progress The public, accountability bodies, and policy makers need a way to measure whether the housing situation is improving for everyone in Aotearoa. More specifically, we need a way to assess whether the right to a decent home grounded on Te Tiriti o Waitangi is being respected or not. The Guidelines address this issue, and this section builds on those foundations.46 Social rights, like the right to a decent home, have some features that are not well known in Aotearoa. For example, it is not well understood that the right to a decent home is subject to progressive realisation. This feature gives rise to an important question: how do we measure progressive realisation? In this section we first provide some general remarks about social rights, and then explain how to measure progressive realisation of the right to a decent home. At the end of the section, we introduce the Commission’s new Measuring Progress indicators. Measuring Progress provides an easily accessible way of tracking progress (or lack of progress) in the housing system across Aotearoa. Throughout 2022, we will release data indicators which measure the progressive realisation of a range of key dimensions for the right to a decent home grounded on Te Tiriti o Waitangi. These will help to measure whether the housing situation is improving for everyone in Aotearoa. As the months pass, we will refine and extend our Measuring Data alone cannot measure values or human rights. For this, mixed methods - quantitative, qualitative, ethnographic – are needed. We acknowledge the indispensable role of data, as well as its limitations. Social rights are human rights As the Guidelines emphasise, human rights embody shared values like fairness, decency, freedom, equality, wellbeing, belonging, manaakitanga, and kaitiakitanga.47 Human rights matter because they relate to people and issues we all care about: people in care, decent work, healthy homes, vibrant communities, and survivors of abuse. They are not just abstract principles. Human rights have content and are protected by international and national law. There are different types of human rights, including civil, political, workers’, social, cultural, and indigenous peoples’ rights. Social rights include the rights to a decent home, health care and protection, and education. They are empowering, emancipatory, and position people as rights holders, not service users. Although social rights are important to everyone, they are especially vital to disadvantaged individuals and communities. There is evidence that social rights improve the lives of individuals and communities. Social rights are not aspirational goals; they are binding human rights commitments. Progress indicators, while making sure they are easy to understand. 25