Achieving the right to a decent home requires accountability Effective and accessible accountability is a crucial feature of human rights, including the right to a decent home. Without accountability, the right to a decent home can become an empty promise. Accountability is about ensuring our laws, policies, strategies, plans, and promises are respected. It does not need to be about blame and punishment. But it’s not enough for government just to monitor and keep an eye on what’s happening. It’s about identifying what works so it can be repeated and what doesn’t work so it can be adjusted and fixed for the future. Accountability can hold different cultural meanings and can be designed in different ways to reflect cultural understandings, needs, and customs. Here, we talk about a particular framework of accountability that is used in the human rights field (called constructive accountability). If you are interested in exploring the topic of accountability from an ao Māori perspective, you can read our Discussion Paper: Understanding Accountability for Māori (see Appendix A for more information). Constructive accountability has three stages: • Monitoring – collecting information and data on progress – is the first step. • Independent review of whether New Zealand’s housing system measures up to minimum human rights standards and whether we are delivering on the promises that have been made. • Remedial action – if the system falls short, local and central government must take action to put things right and make changes for the future. One of our Inquiry’s key recommendations is creating effective accountability structures that will keep our housing system on track and hold government to account on delivering the right to a decent home as they have promised. One of the main ways to ensure that duty bearers act is to hold them accountable. We need better accountability mechanisms – independent bodies with the authority to monitor, review, and evaluate the performance of duty bearers in our housing system. For example, this could look like a Housing Ombudsman or Commissioner alongside an independent Māori Housing Authority. A toolkit to support housing advocacy We encourage you to use human rights language and to call for your human right to a decent home to be made real. In Appendix C, we have included a toolkit with further resources to help people understand the right to a decent home, support and strengthen housing advocacy, and guide housing providers and developers on how the human right can be upheld in their mahi. 33