CathNews New Zealand

“The period over the next few years scares the hell out of me, quite frankly,” says social services expert Professor Michael O’Brien.

Poor outcomes predicted

“We’ve seen a series of decisions taken around benefit levels, around Working for Families, and if anything that will become more difficult and tighter and meaner, and more poverty-creating.

“In the next three to five years … the impact for me, in terms of what that means for low-income households, individuals, low-income disadvantaged communities, doesn’t bear thinking about really.”

O’Brien, also the social security spokesman for Child Poverty Action Group, says the social investment approach promised by the Government will not work to improve outcomes for those in hardship.

“The individualised targeting that they’ve been talking about will not take us anywhere in terms of shifting the dial on incomes, on poverty, on housing affordability, which is what determines what happens for so many individuals and families and communities.”

He says targeting hard-to-reach people and groups at the fringe is one thing, but disagrees this should be the central approach.

Individualised approach an improvement

But Maria English, the chief executive of data analysis company ImpactLab disputes this, arguing an individualised approach makes sure people don’t fall through the cracks.

“It’s about designing services in ways that meet the daily needs, aspirations and priorities of those using the service, rather than what often happens, which is that the users of the service are expected to adapt and organise their lives around the way that those services work,” English explains.

The mindset of aiming to deliver social value for every dollar spent was championed by former finance minister and then Prime Minister Bill English (Maria’s father) and underpins the work of ImpactLab (of which he is the chairman).

English says her experience with social investment is that having local providers on the ground to deliver these individualised services is critical.

“That trust they have is essential to supporting those people who engage with services.

“An example of this is we worked with a group of nurses and a doctor who tracked how many times a nurse needed to visit a family before they were willing to engage with us, for example, to get their kids immunised.

“And they found for some families, it was five visits, but for some families it was 40, and the contract stops at five – they don’t get funded to do 40 visits.

“But actually, that’s the level of trust-building required for people who have experienced a lot of trauma, who don’t trust the system.”

But what about the big issues?

O’Brien says that works for those individuals who can be targeted for a specific need (if they can actually be found), but misses the big structural issues around why the system isn’t working for those families in the first place.

“All you’re doing is continuing what we’ve done for goodness knows how long.

“For example, if you really want to make a difference to low-income households, the most valuable thing you can do is improve their incomes and you do that around benefits, around taxes, around jobs that are solid jobs with good prospects.

“And you don’t do that just simply by dealing individually case by case, on repeat with people with inadequate income and avoiding and dodging those really key questions.”

Another concern O’Brien has is with finding these individuals in the first place, and this includes issues around privacy and stigma.

“If you’ve got a framework in which you’ve got those core issues taken care of around housing, around jobs, around incomes and so on, I don’t know that your data is going to get you very much further on.

“Because the group is relatively small and relevant and quite heterogeneous in many ways and so it’s going to need a lot of individualised attention and individualised responses.

“So I’m not sure that the data work is going to help you when it gets to that level of individual data.”

His fear is that the heavy emphasis placed by the Government on using social investment as the guiding light for social spending is that the other broad-base support won’t be there.

“The difficulty with the way it is developing, is that that is all there is.”

Data quality

The quality of data is something English says could and should be improved – but it can only be done by using it in the first place to see where the gaps are.

“An example of this is we’ve just done an exercise with Manaaki Rangatahi, who are the youth homelessness collective for New Zealand, and they had a really simple question which is, how many young people in New Zealand are homeless?

“We came up with an initial estimate, which was around 20,000 are in some version of homelessness and probably at least 5000 were in severe homelessness, like without shelter, or not in any kind of safe accommodation.

“And what I found remarkable was that we hadn’t done that exercise before and there was some simple things we learnt, like different government departments use different age brackets.

“So it’s actually very difficult to identify that population of young people without caregivers who are homeless, because we can’t even see them in the data because of the way we categorise them, and we only figured that out, because we tried to actually count them.”

Stigma

O’Brien says the issue of stigma is also problematic with individualised responses, giving the example of the free school lunch programme.

“If it was only for those who needed it … those who get school lunches wouldn’t take them up because they don’t want to embarrass themselves by saying, you know, we don’t have enough food.”

But English argues stigma can be addressed.

“I think it’s important to distinguish between the analytical tools and the way services are delivered. People delivering the services understand their communities and families they work with, they’re able to make sophisticated and complex judgments in an evolving situation.”

In other words, the stigma will only be on paper.

O’Brien isn’t convinced: “Good luck with that”, he says.

“A lot of school lunch programmes are delivered locally by local communities currently so there’s nothing different about that.

“This is about real people and no matter how fancy you get with what you do around delivery, there’s stacks of evidence around the world about the way that stigmatising leads to low take up.”

Measuring success

A key part of the social investment concept is the ability to measure whether something has worked and how that success is quantified.

The Social Wellbeing Agency has been tasked with designing standards for government departments to know if their investments in social services are working. Read more

• Emma Hatton is a political journalist at Newsroom

Additional reading

News category: Analysis and Comment.