The Ministry of Social Development is consulting on cutting 22 security guard jobs from 22 regional Work and Income offices, a change that would take each of those sites from three guards down to two, at the same time as the ministry’s own figures show incidents involving a weapon have gone up.
The proposal was reported by RNZ on Wednesday morning and confirmed by the ministry, which says no decision has been made and that consultation with staff runs until 12 August.
The offices in line for a reduction are Dargaville, Flaxmere, Huntly, Johnsonville, Kāpiti, Kamo, Kawakawa, Kawerau, Kerikeri, Morrinsville, Motueka, Mount Maunganui, Ōpōtiki, Paeroa, Richmond, Ruatoria, Te Awamutu, Te Puke, Tokoroa, Tūrangi, Waihi and Wairoa, according to the Public Service Association. Nearly all of them are provincial towns where the Work and Income office is one of the few places a person can walk in and sort out a benefit, a hardship grant or a work obligation face to face.
It is the second round of reductions this year. MSD cut 20 security guard jobs at other Work and Income sites in March.
Figures released to RNZ under the Official Information Act show Work and Income staff recorded 14,420 security incidents over the past five years. Moderate incidents, meaning those without injury, ranged from 708 in 2021 to 1373 in 2025, peaking at 1387 in 2024. Incidents involving a weapon rose from 30 in 2021 to 47 in 2025. Severe incidents peaked at 12 in 2022 and fell to four in 2025. Staff put offices into lockdown 1736 times over the five years, including 544 lockdowns in 2024 and 441 last year.
Those numbers point in two directions at once, and both sides of the argument are leaning on them. The count of everyday incidents and lockdowns is high and has not fallen away. The count of the worst incidents has dropped sharply. Which of those matters more is the question sitting under the whole consultation.
MSD deputy chief executive Melissa Gill said the ministry had spent $80 million making its sites safer, including changes to the physical layout of offices and more staff training, and that the work was a direct response to a WorkSafe court judgment.
“Between 2023 and 2025 our staff reported 11.6 percent more security events. Over the same period, the number of severe security events reduced by more than half,” Gill said.
She said the vast majority of interactions with Work and Income clients were positive, rejected the suggestion that staff were under-reporting incidents, and said the reduction in guard numbers in March had gone smoothly and had not changed the way incidents were handled.
“The safety and security of the public and staff at our sites remains incredibly important to us. We’re making changes because it is safe to do so. This is based on site-by-site risk assessments,” she said.
The unions want the plan dropped. Public Service Association national secretary Fleur Fitzsimons said MSD staff had been spat at, had objects thrown at them, had people jump over desks, and had faced bomb and gun threats.
“We think [incidents] are significantly underreported – the reality is MSD workers deal with unacceptable violence and aggression from members of the public, and security guards are an important response to this, and safety initiative – this is why the proposal should be shelved,” Fitzsimons said.
E tū team leader Cathie Powell said the timing was wrong.
“It doesn’t make sense to us why you would reduce security – at a time when there are more and more people feeling the stress of unemployment, the rising cost of living,” Powell said. “It doesn’t seem like this is the right time to making cuts in these core service places.”
A security guard at one of the affected offices, an E tū member RNZ agreed not to name, called the cuts “absolutely ludicrous”. He said three guards were needed because when a site goes into lockdown one guard takes clients out the back to safety while the other two deal with the person causing the problem. He described threats ranging from verbal abuse through to people saying they would come back with a shotgun.
“We had one guy who tried to come into the office with a knife,” he said.
The reason Work and Income offices have guards at all traces back to September 2014, when two staff members were killed at the Ashburton office. MSD ran an internal review and put on an extra 100 security guards across the network. WorkSafe then took the ministry to court, and in 2016 Judge Jan-Marie Doogue found it had failed to ensure there was no physically unrestricted access to the staff working area. The $80 million Gill refers to is the money spent responding to that judgment.
Twelve years on, the ministry’s argument is essentially that the buildings now do some of the work the guards used to do, and that a site-by-site risk assessment is a better guide than a flat national number of guards per office.
Social Development Minister Louise Upston said the proposal was an operational matter and she was confident officials had prioritised safety.
“I’m advised that all MSD sites will continue to have at least two guards all the hours they are open,” Upston said.
That answer draws the political line fairly clearly. Ministers set budgets and departments decide how to live inside them, so a decision like this one is made by officials rather than announced from the Beehive. It is still a decision about how much the public is willing to spend to keep frontline public servants safe, and it lands in 22 towns where the local Work and Income office is a fixture rather than an abstraction.
With a general election due later this year, the size and cost of the public service is going to be argued over repeatedly, usually in totals rather than in individual jobs at individual counters. If you want to see where the parties actually sit on public spending and services before you vote, our voting tool lines their positions up side by side.
Consultation closes on 12 August. MSD says staff can give feedback before then and that no decision has been taken. An earlier round of cuts reported in February went ahead in March.
What do you think? Should Work and Income offices in small towns keep three security guards, or has the ministry done enough with $80 million of building and training changes to make the third guard unnecessary? Leave a comment below and tell us how it looks from your town.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
Leave a Reply