The Government will set aside a total of $275 million for the new Social Investment Agency to make targeted interventions in the lives of vulnerable New Zealanders.
Finance and Social Investment Minister Nicola Willis announced the fund in a pre-budget speech on Thursday. The bulk of this money would go into a $190 million Social Investment Fund which will pay non-government organisations to deliver social outcomes.
“It will invest in services that deliver measurable improvements in the lives of those who need our help, guided by data and evidence. It will support both new approaches and strengthen existing services that work,” she said.
“Each investment will have robust evaluation built in from the start, so Government can track the Fund’s impact and invest taxpayer money with confidence”.
Social investment is an approach to Government spending which treats social services as long-term investments rather than short-term costs. It aims to fund early interventions which reduce the need for future spending, thus having a positive financial return in the long run.
It generally rewards providers based on the outcomes of services, rather than paying for the provision of services themselves. In some cases, payments will only be made for successful outcomes, but this model provides funding based mostly on a proven track record and ongoing monitoring.
The fund will be expected to invest in at least 20 initiatives over the next year and deploy the full $190 million across four years. Willis said it would “start small and grow over time as it proves itself”.
Three investments have already been lined up: early education for families with young autistic children, a non-specified Emerge Aotearoa programme, and a Palmerston North-based Māori health initiative.
Willis said the Government was already spending $7 billion each year on social services provided by non-government agencies but the impact of that investment is poorly tracked.
“Communities, NGOS and iwi all tell us they could have much more impact in people’s lives if the Government was smarter about the way it selects, contracts, and monitors the social services we fund,” she said.
Separate from the Social Investment Fund, the $275 million budget announcement also included $20 million for programmes that strengthen parenting and $25 million to help prevent children and vulnerable adults from entering state care.
In response to a question, Willis said the remaining $40 million would be used to build a data system for the agency and otherwise scale up its operations.
4 Comments
It generally rewards providers based on the outcomes of services, rather than paying for the provision of services themselves.
And they said no lolly scramble lol. I see a plethora of organisations grabbing the cash and underdelivering, tweaking the reporting to suit, followed by ongoing repots of misallocation of funds and embezzlement, with some positives poking through here and there.
The credibility o this will be dictated by the ability of the govt to monitor and enforce performance outcomes.
interesting,
Sadly, you may well be right. “Communities, NGOS and iwi all tell us they could have much more impact in people’s lives if the Government was smarter about the way it selects, contracts, and monitors the social services we fund,” she said.
On past experience, monitoring will be patchy at best. The pattern seems very clear; outsource as much as possible to the private sector, enabling yet further cuts to the government workforce. I am not against cutting down the role of government, provided it is done smartly and I remain to be convinced that that is the case presently.
Perhaps we should apply the same criteria to Willis and Co; we'd save heaps; they're out of their depth at this point in the human trajectory.
But this is an acknowledgement that capitalism on its own, doesn't work. It trickles up, not down.
"Social investment is an approach to Government spending which treats social services as long-term investments rather than short-term costs. It aims to fund early interventions which reduce the need for future spending, thus having a positive financial return in the long run."
Ummm.....Haven't they built an industry on dismantling such investments?
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