Labour criticises Tama Potaka as new data shows a majority of emergency housing applications in urban Auckland are being declined

Associate Housing Minister Tama Potaka (left) and Prime Minister Christopher Luxon ahead of a post-Cabinet press conference at Parliament earlier this year. Photo / Mark Mitchell

Most people in urban Auckland who applied for emergency housing in August were declined.

That’s according to new data from the Ministry of Social Development that shed light on how the system is working one year on from the Government’s contentious changes that tightened the gateway to emergency housing.

Urban Auckland is home to some of the country’s most socially deprived communities and where almost two-thirds of applications for urgent shelter made in August 2025 were declined.

Some 642 applications for emergency housing were made in the month in urban Auckland and 402 of these were declined.

Emergency housing applications nationally have been declining for several years but this fall became more rapid when the Government introduced new rules in August 2024, which allow officials to decline grants if they believe a person has caused or contributed to their own need.

Labour’s housing spokesman Kieran McAnulty said he “would not be able to sleep at night” if he were the minister overseeing the emergency housing system in its current state. But that minister, Tama Potaka, said he was proud of the Government’s work to move people, including 3000 children, out of “dank and dark” emergency housing motels.

Potaka said most people who had applied for emergency housing and were declined could access other support, such as tenancy bond cover or different types of shelter like transitional housing.

“I’m not going to put up with the motel generation and the hotel generation that was concocted and curated under the reign of the previous Government. That is an absolute social terror that I will not tolerate.”

Potaka described the previous levels of emergency housing, which reached almost 5000 in November 2021, as “one of the biggest public policy failures” in the country’s history and blamed it on the previous Labour Government.

Before the election, National campaigned on reducing the use of emergency housing, including tighter criteria and a new “Priority One” policy, which bumps families with children who have been in emergency housing for 12 weeks or more to the top of the social housing waitlist.

In January this year, the Government celebrated reaching its target of reducing the number of households in emergency housing five years early, citing overall figures dropping from 3141 in December 2023 to 591 in December 2024.

Labour's Kieran McAnulty says he "would not be able to sleep at night" if he were the minister responsible for the current emergency housing situation. Photo / Mark Mitchell

McAnulty said emergency housing was not the solution to the housing crisis but it was “a hell of a lot better than people sleeping rough”.

“Everyone, all the frontline providers, are consistent in the view that the criteria change to emergency housing is what is preventing people in genuine need from getting [emergency housing],” he said.

“I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night knowing that I have caused it and I did not have a solution.”

In recent months, advocates have sounded the alarm over the real-life impacts of the tighter eligibility criteria. Aaron Hendry, co-founder of Auckland-based agency Kick Back, previously told the Herald how young people were now being denied emergency housing when youths in similar circumstances had been accepted a week before the Government’s changes.

Housing Minister Chris Bishop (right), with Social Development Minister Louise Upston (left) and Associate Housing Minister Tama Potaka, announcing steps to end the large-scale use of emergency housing in March 2024. Photo / Mark Mitchell

“A week later, we’re sitting in Work and Income with a very vulnerable young woman who’s telling Work and Income ... she needs emergency housing ... she was denied that support. She ended up going back on the street and sleeping rough that night.

“We’ve had almost countless young people that have had a similar experience where they’ve reached out for support for emergency accommodation, being denied and being left sleeping rough and other cases staying in really dangerous situations.”

Julia Gabel is a Wellington-based political reporter. She joined the Herald in 2020 and has most recently focused on data journalism.