56439 (2025). Hon Kieran McAnulty to the Associate Minister of Housing

56439 (2025). Hon Kieran McAnulty to the Associate Minister of Housing: How many households exited emergency housing in each of July, August, September, October, and November 2025, and of those, how many were known to have (a) entered social housing, (b) entered transitional housing, (c) entered private housing while receiving Accommodation Supplement, or (d) not accessed any subsequent housing-related support?

Hon Tama Potaka: The Ministry of Social Development (the Ministry) has provided some contextual information about the exploratory model. This model tracks the primary applicant for a household receiving an Emergency Housing Grant. The model has been designed as one input to support broader research into outcomes for people receiving Emergency Housing Grants. The model is only able to infer outcomes based on available data and a limited number of assumptions, and therefore it can only provide exploratory, contextual information. For example, there will likely always be households whose accommodation status the Ministry cannot identify after they stop receiving support. People are not obligated to tell the Ministry where they go after staying in emergency housing, and the Ministry does not have an official measure for ‘exits’ from emergency housing in its data. The information available is limited to what is shared and collected within both the Ministry and the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development. Calculations are based on the number of spells in emergency housing that concluded during a month. All spells are counted. A ‘spell’ is derived based on a combination of: 1. a households’ declared check in and check out dates, and 2. whether they do or do not return for a subsequent grant within four weeks. Information is generated quarterly for provision to DPMC, most recently at June 2025. Of the 276 households who ended a stay in emergency housing in June 2025: • 63 (23%) had attained a social housing tenancy, with six (3%) through community housing providers and 57 (21%) through Kainga Ora • 63 (23%) had accessed Accommodation Supplement (this includes clients with mortgage, private rental or board costs) • 93 (33%) had been placed in Transitional Housing • 57 (20%) did not access any of these housing-related services. Because this is an exploratory model, the outputs have previously been provided as unrounded percentages. The application of rounding and suppression rules means that numbers of households in this response may be different to previous information. In particular, I understand from the Ministry that because previous requests for the numbers of spell counts have been ad hoc, and not part of regular reporting, in each instance, rounding has been applied independently. I further note that the number of spells has also decreased significantly, and smaller populations mean that any change to the underlying data can cause seemingly large percentage shifts.