Nick Mills: MSD incentive to reduce emergency housing needs to go

EDITORIAL:  I have been one of the strongest supporters of giving police the power to move rough sleepers on.   I've said repeatedly that we need to clean up our streets.   We need safer city centres.   We need people sleeping in parks, doorways and shop entrances helped.  Helped into accommodation, not just left there.  But yesterday, watching Q+A, I found myself asking a very different question.  At what cost do we achieve that?  Because if the allegations uncovered by Q+A are correct, this isn't just about reducing emergency housing numbers anymore.   It's about whether government targets have created pressure inside MSD that could influence decisions affecting some of our most vulnerable people.  Documents obtained under the Official Information Act show MSD managers are assessed on a range of performance measures, including reducing the number of people receiving emergency housing grants.   Staff are graded as "exceeding", "achieving" or "needs improvement", and the documents state that if performance doesn't meet expectations, an improvement plan can follow.  So we are grading people on whether they keep people out of emergency accommodation.  That should concern every New Zealander.  The Auckland City Mission says these targets create an incentive to say no.   The Christchurch Methodist Mission says nobody should ever be rewarded for denying someone a basic thing like shelter. Those are serious claims.  Now, MSD says emergency housing targets are only one of 11 performance measures and no one faces disciplinary action based solely on that target. That's important context.  But even Housing Minister Tama Potaka appeared surprised.   On Q+A he said he wasn't aware of the performance agreements.   Initially he described them as an operational matter and couldn’t talk about it, but later admitted he could understand why reasonable people might see them as creating an incentive to refuse legitimate applications.  What else could it be seen as?  That answer didn't fill me with confidence.  Yes, the Government inherited an emergency housing system that had exploded.   Nearly 5,000 people were in emergency accommodation in late 2021, costing around $340 million a year.   Reducing those numbers is a worthwhile goal. In fact, the Government reached its target five years early, with emergency housing falling to just 591 people by the end of 2024.  But here's the issue.  If someone genuinely needs emergency housing, they should get emergency housing. Full stop.  End of story in New Zealand.  Targets should measure how quickly we get people into stable, permanent homes—not how effectively we reduce the headline numbers. It’s election year, of course they want to headlines to look better.  Q+A also found that for 16 consecutive months there were more than 1,000 additional inquiries about emergency housing each month than formal applications.   So, people were saying they needed a house but were put off from actually putting an application in because staff were grading them, stopping them.  The most common reason given when applications weren't approved was simply, "the need can be met in another way."  The need can be met in another way? Was that living in a shop front? Was that living in a car? Was that staying in the park?   We can always make the stats look better, can’t we? But this matters.  This matters because the Government also wants police to have new move-on powers over rough sleepers. Put them in jail, which I’m not fully against.   If people are being turned away from emergency housing while at the same time being moved off the streets, where the hell are they supposed to go?  This story has the potential to become a defining issues of this election—not because New Zealanders don’t oppose tough rules, but because as Kiwis we expect some kind of fairness.  Clean up the streets by all means.  Just don't clean up the stats at the expense of the people who genuinely need help.  LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.