Menéndez March Ricardo; Sepuloni CarmelRICARDO MENÉNDEZ MARCH (Green): Kia ora Madam Chair. So I just want to ask a follow-up question to my one on emergency housing and the evidence—or I guess anecdotal commentary by transitional housing providers—to justify charging our people who are homeless. I just wanted to ask what feedback was given by transitional housing providers in the context of the fact that Work and Income already puts obligations on our people who are homeless to—each time they want to roll over emergency housing they have to provide evidence that they're looking for alternative accommodation and people in emergency housing don't have any sort of rights or tenure in general. It's a very precarious place. So you know I would even say that calling it emergency housing" is not fully accurate seeing as people don't have security. So this idea that we're bringing emergency housing in line with transitional housing by adding a cost makes no sense when the conditions are so different. The Ministry of Social Development in the annual review acknowledge that they don't proactively verify the suitability of emergency housing; only when a beneficiary has sort of said that there's concerns maybe they'll go back and check. So I guess I'm interested in the evidence provided by transitional housing providers that this policy is justified and is not simply putting our homeless people into more hardship.Hon CARMEL SEPULONI (Minister for Social Development and Employment): I think it's very fair to say that no one in this House wants to see anyone in emergency accommodation. The fact that we don't have the secure stable housing for New Zealanders that we need at the moment is a reality given that there's been an under-investment in housing for generations. So we are in the unenviable position of needing to put people into emergency accommodation and perhaps rather than calling it "emergency housing" we should just call it "emergency accommodation". So I take that point from the member. As I said these were conversations that were held. It was feedback from the community sector. They themselves were seeing that at some points it was hard to move people from emergency accommodation into transitional public because of this step up from having to pay nothing to then having to pay 25 percent. So it was about being able to support people to move through into more stable accommodation but also consistency. There is work under way in the emergency housing space that the Minister of homelessness is also involved in. You know the reality for front-line Ministry of Social Development staff is that it's not always easy to access emergency housing options but recognising that where we come across emergency accommodation—sorry options that are not fit for purpose or deemed by the clients to be unsafe then we should stop using them. I've made that very clear and we've actually moved in that direction and also we'll move in that direction in other parts of the country. What I will say about Rotorua is that they are different to many parts of the country in that they have many options with regards to motel accommodation so that shift can occur. In other places they don't necessarily have emergency accommodation options or they only have limited emergency accommodation options. So do we need to continue to look at how we can do this better? Yes but the ideal is that we get to the point where we actually have enough stable and secure housing for New Zealanders which is why as a Government we have committed to building 18400 new places within four years and we're on track to deliver on that."