Menéndez March Ricardo; Sepuloni CarmelRICARDO MENÉNDEZ MARCH (Green): Thank you Madam Chair. Just picking up on the issue around sanctions and work seminars there are reports of the Ministry of Social Development (MSD) threatening to cut job seekers' income in half in error. This is reported by Ethan Te Ora from The Post on 19 July of 2023. This has followed a doubling of benefit sanctions in the Wellington region. So while I take the point that benefit sanctions have decreased over the period when we had lockdowns a doubling of sanctions in three months is quite a significant increase.Why I was asking the Minister about her confidence in the integrity of information gathering in those workshops and even the value of those workshops and whether they're meaningfully supporting people into employment is that MSD has been unable to actually give us information of how many people who attend those workshops are actually entering employment and how many are attending those workshops. That information seems not to be collected centrally but the information that is collected centrally is how many people are punished for not being engaged with those workshops.So if the Minister's not able to quantify actually how many people are being supported into jobs as a direct and tangible result of those work seminars how is she confident that those workshops are worth it when all we can actually understand is how many people are punished. So I guess I'm just asking the Minister to reassure us that over the course of the next year she can quantify how many people are supported into good well-paying employment as a direct result of those work seminars in the same way she's able to quantify directly how many people are punished as a direct result of not engaging with those work seminars.Hon CARMEL SEPULONI (Minister for Social Development and Employment): Thank you. To that question and it has been raised before I think that the chief executive may have spoken to it at select committee as well. The work seminars on their own are not something that necessarily will support someone into employment. Someone may attend a work seminar and then learn about the Mana in Mahi programme or learn about some of the other employment products that are there some of the other supports that are in place. They may get support for how they look for jobs what they need to do to prepare for work but on their own they can't be measured as something that will support someone into work by itself. There's a whole lot of support that needs to go around it. For some it will be the ongoing work and support that they're getting from their front-line work-focused case manager as well.And so when we have programmes that are work-focused like Mana in Mahi He Poutama Rangatahi Flexi-wage Apprenticeship Boost we can measure how many people go into those and then whether or not they retain the work that they take up and then whether or not they come back on to benefit or not—whether they complete and then go and do something else—so it is measurable I guess. But the work seminars by themselves are not something where you can measure an employment outcome; they are just a part of what is provided to help prepare and support someone on their employment journey and into work.In terms of sanctions again I would need the member and anyone else who has examples where they think that someone has been treated unfairly with a sanction applied where it shouldn't have been to let me know. And obviously if there was a number of cases and it looked like there was something happening that wasn't quite right then we would look into it further. But otherwise it would be a case by case basis. And just to assure that member the review of sanctions is under way.