Watch live: Disability services to move from Whaikaha to MSD after budget

Whaikaha, the Ministry of Disability, will be restructured – it will lose responsibility for the provision of support services and the transition to the new approach will be put on hold.

The Government announced the decision following a critical review which found that the Ministry was not prepared to effectively manage the scale and nature of its funding and that budget control was inadequate.

The ministry will become a stand-alone agency – no longer sharing back-office functions with the Ministry of Social Development (MSD) – responsible for strategic policy advice, advocacy and monitoring. The transfer will be managed by a task force, and the transition to a stand-alone agency will be implemented via a Council Order in October.

All support services will be transferred to MSD and implementation of the Enabling Good Lives approach will be paused “to ensure access to support is equitable and based on need, not location”.

Funding levels for residential care will also be maintained at current levels, with no increases to keep up with inflation. The Government will also reinstate indicative budgets and monitoring for Needs Assessment and Service Coordination organisations.

Disability Minister Louise Upston said in a statement that the transfer of support services to MSDs was “significant but necessary”.

“MSD already has the control and capacity to better manage this funding. It will also resolve the conflict for the Ministry of Disability – Whaikaha, which has both an advocacy and service delivery role, making it a representative and powerful voice in government for disabled New Zealanders.”

She added that the Government was committed to supporting people with disabilities, “which is why in this year’s Budget we have allocated a record $1.1 billion to support disability services”.

How did we get here?

The changes to how disability services are funded were introduced in March without prior notice and were announced on the ministry’s social media shortly after the coalition took office.

The moves came as a surprise to people using services, with community groups expressing their opposition and then-minister Penny Simmonds admitting there had been insufficient communication.

She said the changes were a result of budget overruns at the ministry.

The Cabinet then took a closer look at changes to the ministry and Simmonds was later removed from his role.

About a quarter of New Zealanders have some type of disability. People with disabilities are often heavy users of the health care system, but the constraints society places on people with disabilities extend far beyond health to employment, housing, transport, education and many others.

The creation of the Whaikaha Ministry was announced by the then Labor government in 2021, promising it would be a single point of contact for disabled people.

The government has also promised a nationwide rollout of the Enabling Good Lives approach to disability support services, which focuses on giving disabled people more choice about how they spend their funding. However, the purse has changed hands several times and funding for the approach has long been a concern.

These decisions followed a review of health and disability led by Heather-Simpson which, despite its name, did not substantively consult with disabled people and made little mention of disability, accessibility or related support services.

Disability is not mentioned separately until page 150.

Activist groups have been calling for support to be moved outside the healthcare system for decades, arguing that disability is not just a health issue and disabled people are often bounced between different government departments, with different levels of support being awarded arbitrarily based on the cause of the disability rather than need.

The huge disparity between the support offered to disabled people through ACCs and the support offered to disabled people through DHBs is also a serious problem.

The ACC was also found to be biased against women, Māori and Pacific people, and disabled people who needed help due to injury had to use ACC services and the social care system simultaneously.