This article was originally published in December 2015.
The Hon. Bill English MP, the New Zealand Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Finance and the Minister Responsible for Housing New Zealand Corporation addressed this year’s inaugural Life Course Centre Conference.
In his luncheon address on Friday 30 October Mr English outlined the lessons learned from the development and implementation of a new model of social welfare reform in New Zealand, based on a system of social investment.
Mr English outlined, from his government’s standpoint, the need to change the system of welfare so that better results could be achieved from spending, through using an investment approach that is informed by data.
He said that many reforms and expenditure in his country had failed to make a difference to disadvantaged lives, while still driving costs in the system.
“One early step was to shift the debate about disadvantage in social services from levels of funding to one of getting results,” Mr English said.
For three years the government did a six-monthly actuarial valuation of the 275 000 people on welfare rolls, he said, which predicts a path over the next 30 years and calculates net present value.
“This approach revealed insights such as in our bottom 3% of children a significant proportion will cost a million dollars by the time they are 35, a powerful message to politicians,” he said.
As a result of these types of insights, programs were rolled out to reduce the number of single parents and the associated costs of welfare support, which achieved a drop of 40 percent in the number of sole parents since 1986.
“If the government is forced to deal with our most-vulnerable individuals and families and offer long-term support, for say five years, this can avoid decades of welfare payouts,” Mr English said.
According to Mr English, their single jurisdiction structure has allowed New Zealand to have a comprehensive infrastructure of linked administrative datasets.
“Actuarial work and the ability to link anyone across services within government is transforming our policy landscape by providing persuasive evidence. We can now identify the three risk factors that determine the worst outcomes for our kids.
“This enables us to stop talking about government departments and instead about actual communities and households,” he said.
Mr English said he favours a system where government departments know who does and who doesn’t get their service, that takes the service to those who need it and that can answer the question, ‘Did the most disadvantaged benefit from the service?’
“Advances in technology means that people on the frontline such as social and community workers become empowered by having access to information for making good decisions. This can threaten traditional decision-making structures because it is democratising the knowledge,” Mr English said.
Mr English was first elected to Parliament in 1990 as MP for the Wallace electorate and served as the local MP for 24 years. He held ministerial posts in education, health, revenue and finance and was leader of the National Party from October 2001 to October 2003.