Nicola Willis puts new Social Investment Agency at heart of Government

The Government is looking for a permanent chief executive and advisory board for its new Social Investment Agency, a department created under the last National-led Government, but which was renamed and slipped into irrelevance under Labour. The coalition Government is also preparing to beef up the data collection and sharing abilities of departments in order to make the agency more effective, although powering up the big data collection powers of the agency could prove controversial.

The new agency will join the vaunted ranks of Treasury, the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (DPMC) and the Public Service Commission as one of the elite group of “central agencies” – this puts it at the heart of the Government, with oversight over other departments. This Government has created two new central agencies since taking office, the other being David Seymour’s Regulation Ministry.

Social Development Minister Nicola Willis said the Public Service Commission was looking for a chief executive for the agency, which, like other departmental chief executives, would report to the Public Service Commissioner.

Willis announced she would be establishing a Social Investment Board of six to eight members, which would be appointed by and advise Cabinet and the Social Investment Minister.

“We want the board to bring practical knowledge, experience with data, evaluation and commissioning, grass-roots insight and a willingness to challenge the status-quo. There are many exceptional New Zealanders who already know what works and what doesn’t for people in need and we want to harness their insights,” Willis said.

A Cabinet paper released with the announcement noted the board would be established as an “advisory committee” to provide “independent advice and assurance to ministers and guidance to the Social Investment Agency as needed”.

The Government will disestablish the Social Wellbeing Board, which is made up of the chief executives of large social-sector government agencies.

Labour leader Chris Hipkins said “getting rid of one board to replace it with a working group will not ‘power up’ the system, and is not the urgent approach they promised”.

Hipkins said it was “odd” of the Government to send out a job ad for a chief executive via a press release.

“I imagine applicants will be few and far between given Nicola Willis’ propensity to fire members of the public service if the politics don’t go her way,” he said.

Social Investment Minister Nicola Willis. Photo / Mark Mitchell

Willis’ Cabinet paper set out a handful of other changes she wanted to make, although it is not clear whether all of the changes have been successful.

The paper said Willis wanted to designate the Social Investment Agency as a “central agency in its own right”, noting that it was in the past only a departmental agency that was hosted by the Public Service Commission. It was not initially clear whether Willis had succeeded in making the agency a central agency. The Public Service Commission had not updated its list of central agencies to include the Social Investment Agency until the Herald inquired into why it was missing.

Willis’ paper also set out the roles of the redesigned agency, which include setting the standards for social investment practice to create “consistency” across agencies; assisting with data collection and “evidence infrastructure” for social investment; working with other agencies to apply the social investment approach, and leading an “ongoing review” of social sector spending to measure outcomes.

The Government appears to define “social sector spending” quite broadly, with Willis’ paper putting the figure at roughly $70 billion annually, equating to roughly half of all core Crown spending. New Zealand spends about $42b on social security and welfare payments but most of that is superannuation. The Cabinet paper suggests education and housing spending have been included.

"Very high needs" children have many "serious" interactions with government services. Graph / Nicola Willis Cabinet Paper

The social investment approach was first applied in New Zealand by former Prime Minister Sir Bill English. The idea behind it is that the state could do a better job at targeting specific policy interventions at people in high need. It often involves partnering with community organisations who provide these services. Social investment is based on the “ambulance at the top of the cliff” concept that the Government would help people better if it could find those at greatest need and target them with specific government services and interventions.

Willis’ Cabinet paper illustrated this with a recent analysis by the Social Investment Agency (in its former guise as the Social Wellbeing Agency) of the factors that drove young people into crime.

It noted that by age 5, 64% of young people with “very high needs” had contact with a public service agency for a “serious issue”. These interactions continued as they grew older. Children from “low needs” backgrounds had far fewer interactions with the state.

It showed that 83% of young people with the greatest number of youth crime “risk factors” lived with an adult who had been convicted and sentenced for a relatively serious criminal offence, while 92% were in households supported by a main benefit.

Over one-third (38%) lived with families where the income per family member (equivalised income) was less than $20,000 a year.

Willis plans some changes to Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI), the heart of the old social investment model. IDI brings together data collected by agencies about peoples’ education, income, benefits, migration, justice and health. The data is anonymised so that it cannot be traced back to individual people and households and then linked together to form a picture of people’s lives and society at large.

The paper warned that currently IDI was “poorly resourced” and “reliant on the goodwill of agencies to add their data and hampered by out-of-date rules”.

The paper did not specify which out-of-date rules hampered the IDI.

The paper said the Government would need to balance “rules, ethics and transparency” to maintain its social licence for the data collection with “ensuring that the vast amounts of data the Government holds is able to [be] used for better decision-making”.

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

Thomas Coughlan is Deputy Political Editor and covers politics from Parliament. He has worked for the Herald since 2021 and has worked in the press gallery since 2018.