Bishop Chris; Hipkins ChrisCHRIS BISHOP (National): Thank you Mr Speaker. I was waiting for the chair but of course the chair is not here as we are in these straitened circumstances. So can I just start by begging the House's indulgence to thank once again all the Kiwis out there who are getting tested in their thousands and we do need to keep those testing numbers up and everyone else getting vaccinated as well—63000 yesterday I think it was; we hope those numbers continue to increase—and all of the healthcare workers out there around the country who are doing such a hard job particularly in our MIQs who are keeping New Zealand safe.I've got a series of things I want to discuss with the Minister in relation to the Estimates and the forward-looking projections for the forthcoming year. I thought I'd start with managed isolation. There has been a little bit of interest in the last couple of months I suppose you'd say from the Government in purpose-built facilities moving away from hotels. So in relation to that I suppose a couple of questions to start with: what is the Government planning in terms of purpose-built facilities for managed isolation in the next year and out in the forward Estimates and is the Government still looking to purchase hotels as has been indicated potentially in the past?Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister for COVID-19 Response): I was hoping the member Chris Bishop might give me a few more questions before we get into it but that's all right; I'll get into that particular issue around the purpose-built facilities for managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ).I think as I've canvassed with the member before all options remain on the table. At this point when we established the MIQ facilities the fastest way to do that was to contract existing hotels. It meant that you had rooms available very quickly fully staffed fully catered and that was able to be stood up very quickly. Of course a lot of work has gone into making sure that we drive as much risk out of those facilities as possible but they are not purpose-built facilities. Purpose-built facilities would likely take quite a long period of time and be quite expensive to build at the scale of our current MIQ operations.We can operationalise about 4500 rooms at any given time. That means there's a lot more rooms in the system than the 4500 because you've got to allow for the fact that you can't have rooms occupied 24/7. They have to be cleaned in between use. And then the irregular nature unfortunately of travel in and out of the country means it's not always possible to optimise the use of those rooms—in the sense that a room might sit empty for five or six days. That doesn't mean it can be occupied by someone because it has to be empty for the full 14-day period in order for it to be able to be booked. So there is a degree of inefficiency in the system. Because it's a minimum two-week block booking effectively that means that you need a lot more rooms than you need in terms of operational capacity.The purpose-built MIQ facilities is something that we'll continue to consider. One of the big question marks and I don't think it will come as a surprise to anyone in the House is exactly how long we're likely to be using MIQ at the scale that we are using it at the moment. I think it is likely that we will need quarantine facilities; whether we need isolation facilities is another debate. So at the moment we have three hotels that we're using for quarantine—that's for people who have COVID-19. It is likely that we'll need to continue to be able to supply quarantine. The Government is looking at alternatives around isolation and that includes the ability to isolate at home and the extent of our willingness to do that of course is going to depend a lot on what happens in the next few months around vaccination around the overall risk of COVID-19 spreading in the community and what that means for us as a country.So therefore—I know this is a roundabout way of answering the member's question—we don't have any plans on the books right now to build purpose-built facilities but we certainly haven't taken them off the table. Part of the consideration there around that particular debate would be what we would do with those facilities in the periods when they were not required for managed isolation or quarantine. And so that's part of the conversation too.