Labour will shortly be making an announcement about emergency housing provisions, says Labour Party leader David Cunliffe on a visit to Tauranga today.

He made the announcement while inspecting the Tauranga Community Housing Trust's 14 unit Clarke Street development.

Bay of Plenty Labour candidate Clare Wilson, Labour leader David Cunliffe, site project manager Aaron Thomas and parliamentary services staff member Fiona Proudlock at the Tauranga Community Housing Trusts new development on Clarke Street.

Speaking during an inspection tour of the construction site, David says the Tauranga stories being told to him today by the trust, match those from Manurewa where he was yesterday.

Clare Wilson, labour candidate BOP told him of a Tauranga mother who leaves her children parked in the car while she goes to work.

Aged 11, nine, and a ‘littlie' they remain in the car all day and to go a city park to use the toilets when their mother finishes work.

Their car is their home, says Clare. The mother won't seek official help for a fear of losing the children. The 11-year-old is too young to babysit.

He was also told about an unemployed Tauranga man, who cannot accept the job offer being presented because he's also living out of his car, and there will be nowhere for the children to come back to after school.

He's number 180 on the Housing New Zealand list, which means he has a two year wait for HNZ accommodation. Meanwhile he's dossing with friends and relatives in overcrowded living situations.

The irony is people don't think Tauranga has a housing problem, says Tauranga Community Housing Trust manager Chris Johnson.

'Just look around, the suburbs are nice. But there are a lot of really sad cases. It doesn't look like a place with a major social problem.”

It's been made worse by the National Party taking $215 million of Housing New Zealand money to pay for tax cuts, says David.

'And now we have people sleeping in cars.”

'Housing New Zealand is being retrenched so quickly that the social housing division isn't keeping up and the victims of this revolving door are falling between the cracks.

'Although it's too early to give the details, I do want to foreshadow that we are going to be making an announcement shortly about emergency housing provisions.

'We are very concerned about the growing number of families that are sleeping rough, and three or more families in a three bedroomed house, because there's no other option.

'People sleeping in garages, sleeping in cars, people sleeping in the streets, people turning to prostitution. It's just awful.

'I met yesterday with the Salvation Army at their housing trust in Manurewa, two or three other social providers and a number of local school principals, who are all saying they are reporting it because it's acute for them.

'They have children coming to school who have been sleeping in a car. They are malnourished, barely properly dressed and its winter and the school principals are saying it's unacceptable. And we are saying it's unacceptable in a country, which is blessed with such resources that we should have people missing out in that way.”

'We are deeply concerned at the way housing New Zealand's been cut back and cut back. Both in the way its balance sheet has been plundered and the way it's role is being circumscribed.

'So that now with policy going to the Ministry of Social Development, the whole idea of Housing New Zealand as a home broker has gone.”

People can ring the ministry, but it's at arm's length through a service provider and there is no one person engaging as a go between with the client, says David.

'In my own electorate the Housing New Zealand office was just down the road. You could go down and see them. If there was a really bad case I would go and see them, and the fact that I had turned up on their door step would make them go ‘Oops it must be a bad one'. That whole relationship's gone.”

While in Tauranga David Cunliffe also addressed a Chamber of Commerce lunch at Mills Reef.