Williams PotoPOTO WILLIAMS (Labour—Christchurch East): Tēnā koe Mr Speaker and thank you very much. Recently I have had a change of staff in my electorate office in New Brighton and I have welcomed back a staff member into the role of just kind of looking after the issues in the electorate; she has been with me for about 6 weeks. We have a practice in my office of keeping some pretty good statistics of what is going on in the electorate and what kinds of concerns our local people are raising.In the last 6 weeks I have had 28 inquiries from people who are concerned about their inability either to be able to afford the rent in their home or to be able to afford bonds to get into properties. That is quite a lot of people when you think about it. It is the MP's office; we are not Work and Income and we are not a social housing provider—it is the MP's office. In 6 weeks we have had 28 inquiries all from low-income people who are all beneficiaries so all should qualify for Housing New Zealand homes. All of these people are in the private rental market. We would ask why they are not in Housing New Zealand homes. It is simply because there are not enough Housing New Zealand houses to house our people. Why would that be? It is because the Government has been on this mission to sell off what is actually its core responsibility to people and that is to house them.Recently we have had an announcement that there are going to be another 2500 Housing New Zealand homes sold in Christchurch. That represents 39 percent of the stock in Christchurch and it is over three suburbs: Shirley Riccarton and Bryndwr. All of the Housing New Zealand properties in those three suburbs are going to be sold. They are going to be sold to social housing providers according to the Government.Chris Bishop: To social housing providers?POTO WILLIAMS: They are going to be sold to social housing providers by the Government. When we have a look at why this is happening—why is this happening? Is there support within the social housing providers for this? Let us have a look at what the Government has tried to do in Invercargill and Horowhenua. A similar scheme failed to sell 348 homes in Invercargill and I think about 150 in Horowhenua—because we just cannot make this work. It cannot work. Where is the money coming from? Where is the capital going to come from for these 2500 homes that we are going to sell in Christchurch?We have got respected social housing providers like the Christchurch Methodist Mission and the Salvation Army that are saying clearly that they do not want a bar of this. There is a level of mistrust amongst those very reputable social housing providers: that they are not going to be able to afford to purchase these homes and that once they get them they are not going to be in a state that is habitable for people and there is going to be a lot of rework required; or that the burden that they are going to have long term to continue the upkeep and the maintenance on these is going to be outside their ability to deliver. And they want to deliver. They want to deliver good quality housing for the people of Canterbury.Will this increase the number of social housing homes in Canterbury? It certainly will not. Will it improve the quality of that housing? I do not think so. Let us have a look at what the Minister said. The Minister Bill English said: In Christchurch Housing New Zealand has done an excellent job of repairing and rebuilding its earthquake-damaged stock but one in five of these properties is underutilised." He then goes on to say: "There is now an opportunity for a private provider to renew reconfigure and develop these properties to much better match demand and finish earthquake remediation work.""Finish earthquake remediation work"—the Government is going to sell off Housing New Zealand homes that have not had their earthquake remediation work completed. There is the answer to the question "Will it improve the quality of housing?". So what is the impact of this—the impact of the Government pushing the sale of Housing New Zealand homes when we clearly have a housing crisis in this country? I go back to my first point: it is those 28 people who have come into my electorate office over the last 6 weeks looking for support to get into housing. That is the impact."