Upston Louise; Sepuloni CarmelHon LOUISE UPSTON (National—Taupō): Thank you Madam Chair—still got a lot of contributions and questions to ask the Minister in the 2022-23 appropriations debate for Vote Social Development given that it is a $40—four-zero—billion vote.I want to turn the attention to emergency housing and reflect on some discussions I've had both in my own electorate in Taupō and the neighbouring one of Rotorua and the issue of course of the number of people who are living in emergency housing and my questions will be specifically around the impact on a child under the age of three living in a motel. We know that there are currently 4000 children in motels in New Zealand and the whole committee actually expressed very deep concerns about the wellbeing of children who are living in motels. But I want to specifically ask the questions from Rotorua because the feedback from the community there is that it's now not just the wellbeing of those who are living in the motels it is the wellbeing of the community in which those motels are located and the economic opportunities of the surrounding area that is now significantly being impacted by Ministry of Social Development's (MSD's) decisions and the motels that continue to be used in vast numbers and in concentration. So my questions are specifically around any studies that the MSD have done on the impacts of child wellbeing for those that are living in motels. Obviously the Prime Minister has led the children and youth wellbeing strategy of which housing is an issue. So I want to know specifically about work that MSD is doing around children's wellbeing for those who are living in motels. There was an absolutely tragic environment in my electorate that unfortunately we had many many warnings of before an incident actually occurred in which children witnessed the murder of a parent. So these are dire environments and I want to know what specific actions MSD is taking to support the children who are living there the studies on their wellbeing what the long-term action plan will be to support those children. We know also that there is a group of them—and that's impacting their ability to attend school. That will have a lifetime impact unless significant action is taken to address those children's needs and wellbeing. So what is the immediate action? When will there no longer be children living in motels? What science and research has been done on the impact of children under three? What is the remedial action to support these young children to get into school? What percentage of the housing support budget is actually going to the people that are living there and in particular the children?Hon CARMEL SEPULONI (Minister for Social Development and Employment): Again a lot traversed there and I'll do my best. We don't want to see any children living in emergency motel accommodation. No one does and no one would pretend that it is in any way shape or form the ideal or even close to you know OK. However what we were left with when we came in was an under-investment in housing and a demand that couldn't be met. We had increased homelessness and so we have set about a very ambitious building programme with the aim to build 18000 public houses. And I think we're about 10000 done already to meet the demand that is out there. In the meantime we inherited the emergency housing system that was set up in 2016 in response to the homelessness issue that had arisen at that time. What we have moved to do to ensure that the families are getting the support that they need—because when we took this on there were no supports in place or consistent supports in place for people that were in emergency accommodation—was to ensure that all of those whānau are under intensive case management that they are not only engaging with the Ministry of Social Development (MSD) on whatever their emergency housing accommodation situation is but are engaged with the MSD with any of the broader needs that they may have during that time that they are in there. For Rotorua specifically between MSD the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development and stakeholders on the ground in Rotorua they moved to a contracting model so we could ensure that people were appropriately in cohorts that were appropriate with respect to where they were staying. In particular we had our minds turned to the needs of whānau that had children and wanting to make sure that if they had to be in emergency accommodation then it would be appropriate emergency accommodation for the parents and their children. So that has happened in Rotorua. The Minister of Housing Megan Woods who has much of the responsibility for this because I do need to add that as the Minister for Social Development my responsibility is for the emergency housing special needs grant so I think I'm speaking a little bit outside of my delegations here—we have also commissioned a review to be undertaken of the emergency housing system keeping in mind that it was really set up on the fly. And that's not a criticism at all. It was the previous Government; they responded to the need at the time. But we inherited an emergency housing system that wasn't thought through that was a response to the homelessness that they were seeing. So now we've commissioned a review so that we can look at how we can do that better. The absolute fundamental thing to this is that we actually do not want to see people in emergency accommodation at all. However despite the pace we have been able to build public housing at and despite the pace or the conditions that we've been able to change to support private developers to get those houses built we're still in a situation where we don't have the housing that we need. And so there will be the review of the emergency housing system. We are expecting that our officials will be reporting back to us in October. We set the parameters with regards to what we expect to see and at that point in time we hope to have more comprehensive answers for that.