Woods MeganHon Dr MEGAN WOODS (Minister of Housing): I encourage the member to look at the detail to understand our Government's commitment to the community housing sector. So if I have a look at the number of new places that community housing providers (CHPs) have provided into the public housing sector since we came into Government that's 6077 since 2017 and 615 this financial year alone.We have made a number of changes in regard to CHPs since we came in one of which is as part of our Māori and Iwi Housing Innovation strategy we've worked to ensure that actually we have some Māori providers in this space with by Māori for Māori solutions. We also have an active programme of work in the Pasifika sector as well ensuring that we grow our sector in that area.One of the conversations that we had early on with CHPs is that we were different as a Government in our approach to public housing. Our approach to public housing wasn't the way in which you grow the CHPs sector by selling off the State houses to them. We said we actually wanted to see everybody working together to solve the housing crisis. That involved Kāinga Ora building new houses and that also involved CHPs building new houses.Now at one point under the previous Government I think it got as high as something like 67 percent of the new delivery by CHPs was buy-ins. That benefited no one and did nothing to solve a housing crisis. That's why we changed the settings and have put this very much squarely around additionality. That's why we've worked really hard to ensure that when CHPs are providing new places they are new builds.If we have a look at the new builds that our CHPs have delivered since we've come into Government of those 6077 3703 were redirects—and to be fair to the CHPs of the legacy of the previous Government's sell-off of State houses still some of those contracts with redirects are in play so that flogging off is still with us today—and 1472 of those 6000 are new builds. I want to see more of that proportion from our CHPs being new builds because building houses is how you solve a housing crisis—in the same way that we've put that requirement on to Kāinga Ora to ensure that it is ensuring that new builds are the priority.We've also had to make some other changes to unleash the potential of CHPs particularly CHPs outside of our urban settings because what we found is that the settings were very much only focused on CHPs being able to deliver in our main urban centres. So we've done a couple of things: we've raised the market rent maxima and we've done that outside of the urban centres. The market rent maxima of course pertains to the income-related rent subsidy (IRRS) and the top-up that the community housing provider gets between the 25 percent of a tenant's income and what the market rent would be. It was set very low in regional New Zealand and it's one of the reasons why under the previous Government not only was Housing New Zealand not building and selling off in the regional centres but the CHPs weren't either because that rent maxima wasn't set at a level that made it economic for our CHPs to build in those areas. We have addressed that; we have changed that. It's why once again we are seeing the building of public housing both by CHPs and by Kāinga Ora in our regional centres where we have not seen work happening for decades.What we've also done is early stage Operating Supplement funding. We're doing 25 years of contracts with upfront funding which allows those CHPs to capitalise and to be able to build. It's these kinds of initiatives which is exactly why our CHPs sector has been able to grow by over 6000 in the four and a bit years that we've been in Government. But fundamentally what it's taken is a commitment by this Government to commit to increases in the operating funding through the income-related rent subsidy. I'm still waiting to hear what the National Party would do in Government in relation to the IRRS because that is the constraint on growth whether it be through Kāinga Ora or a CHP. What we can see is it's nearly a quadrupling of operating funding that's going to CHPs under our Government compared to the previous Government. So I think the CHPs have a lot to celebrate by having a Government that has a commitment to public housing in power.CHAIRPERSON (Hon Jenny Salesa): Members we have about three minutes left in this session.