Nicola Willis puts new Social Investment Agency at centre stage of government

A Cabinet paper published alongside the announcement said the board would be set up as an “advisory committee” that would provide “independent advice and assurances to Ministers and guidance to the Social Investment Agency as required”.

The government intends to disband the Social Wellbeing Council, which comprises the chief executives of large government agencies dealing with social affairs.

Labour leader Chris Hipkins said that “getting rid of one council and replacing it with a working group will not ‘strengthen’ the system and is not the urgent approach they were promising”.

Hipkins said it was “strange” for the Government to send out an advertisement for a chief executive position via a press release.

“I imagine there will be few candidates given Nicola Willis’s penchant for firing members of the public service if the political situation is not going her way,” he said.

Willis’s cabinet document included several other changes she wanted to make, although it is unclear whether all of them proved effective.

The article said Willis wanted to designate the Social Investment Agency as a “central agency in its own right,” noting that it had historically been merely a departmental agency hosted by the Public Service Commission. It was initially unclear whether Willis had succeeded in making the agency a central agency. The Public Service Commission did not update its list of central agencies to include the Social Investment Agency until Herald he asked why he wasn’t there.

Willis’s article also outlined the roles of the reorganised agency, which include setting standards for social investment practices to ensure “consistency” across agencies; helping to build data and an “evidence infrastructure” for social investment; working with other agencies to apply social investment approaches; and leading a “continuous review” of social sector spending to measure outcomes.

The government seems to define “social sector spending” quite broadly, with the Willis document putting the figure at around $70 billion per year, which is about half of all core Crown spending. New Zealand spends around $42 billion on social security and welfare benefits, but most of that is superannuation. The Cabinet document suggests that spending on education and housing is included.

The social investment approach was pioneered in New Zealand by former Prime Minister Sir Bill English. The idea behind it is that the state could better target specific policy interventions to those in greatest need. This often involves partnerships with community organisations that provide these services. Social investment is based on the concept of the ‘clifftop emergency service’, which argues that the government would be better able to help people if it could find those in greatest need and target specific government services and interventions to them.

This phenomenon was illustrated by a document from the Willis Cabinet, which recently published an analysis by the Social Investment Agency (formerly the Social Wellbeing Agency) into the factors that push young people to commit crime.

It found that by the age of 5, 64% of young people with “very high needs” had contact with a public service agency about a “serious matter.” These interactions continued as they grew older. Children from “low needs” families had significantly fewer interactions with the state.

The study found that 83% of young people with the highest number of ‘risk factors’ for youth offending lived with an adult who had been convicted of a relatively serious offence, while 92% lived in households supported by the main benefit.

More than one third (38%) lived in families where the income per family member (equivalent income) was less than $20,000 per year.

Willis is planning some changes to the Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI), the heart of the old social investment model. IDI combines data collected by agencies on people’s education, income, benefits, migration, justice and health. The data is anonymised so it cannot be linked to individuals or households, then combined to create a picture of people’s lives and society as a whole.

The document warned that the IDI is currently “insufficiently resourced” and “dependent on the goodwill of agencies to add data, and its operation is hampered by outdated regulations.”

The article does not specify which outdated regulations made it difficult to conduct IDI.

The document said the government would need to find a balance between “principles, ethics and transparency” to maintain the public’s license to collect data while also “ensuring that the vast amounts of data the government has at its disposal can be used to make better decisions.”

This suggests another discussion about the trade-offs between privacy and the risks and benefits of using big data to make effective, fine-grained policy interventions.

Thomas Coughlan is deputy politics editor and covers politics in Parliament. He has worked for Herald since 2021, and has been working in the press gallery since 2018.