Program Summary

Many homes are cold and unhealthy because they don’t have enough insulation. A warm, dry home with well-installed insulation is healthier and easier to heat.

More than 286,000 homes have been insulated under the Warm Up New Zealand programme (to the end of October 2015). This figure includes more than 45,000 retrofits under the Warm Up New Zealand: Healthy Homes programme which offers free insulation to households at high risk from health conditions related to cold, damp housing.

Cost benefit Analysis

The benefits of the programme are expected to comprise:

• improvements in comfort of houses because of increased temperatures and reduced damp and draught;
• improved health outcomes as a result of the changes in temperature and damp/draught;
• increased energy efficiency of houses (reduced energy requirement to meet temperature outcomes) that may result in some overall reduction in energy consumption;
• an increase in employment and production, at a time of depressed economic activity, as a result of increased activity in affected sectors.

The benefits are expected to be shared between households and the producers and installers of insulation. The different benefits have been analysed in three separate papers produced as part of this study. These analyse the impacts on:

• energy use;
• health outcomes; and
• producer surpluses, with additional data on employment. The producer surplus and additional employment benefits are deducted from gross costs in order to calculate the actual resource costs (ie. opportunity costs) of the programme.

The costs of the programme are assessed in this report and include the resource costs of the additional insulation and clean heating plus the administrative costs falling on the government. Administrative costs for companies are assessed as part of the report on impacts on industry. The costs of the programme are then compared with the benefits to arrive at a calculation of net benefits attributable to the programme.