Winz cost-saving doesn't look at big picture - expert

Economist Paula Rebstock heads a working group reviewing the welfare system. Photo / Dean Purcell

A personalised case management system designed to help welfare beneficiaries into work has been largely abandoned, just as a review group looks for new ways to reduce welfare dependency.

Work and Income head Patricia Reade says beneficiaries who need an appointment now see the next available case manager in their local office, rather than waiting for their personal case manager.

She says the change has boosted productivity - the number of clients each case manager sees each day - by 30 per cent.

But economist Paula Rebstock, who heads a working group reviewing the welfare system to reduce long-term benefit dependence, says the change reflects a policy framework based on minimising costs rather than reducing the future costs of welfare.

She cited the Accident Compensation Corporation as a model for "front-loading" efforts to get clients back to work through medical treatment and personalised assistance, saying its insurance-based funding system gave it an incentive to cut costs.

ACC has halved its number of clients on weekly compensation for more than a year from a peak of 29,000 in 1997 to 15,000 today.

In the same period Work and Income's sickness and invalids' benefit rolls have gone from 80,000 to 141,000.

Ms Rebstock said the agency's move away from personalised case management was "responding to the policy framework they are operating in".

"If you want a fundamental change, you have to change that framework," she said.

She said funding welfare benefits on an ACC-style insurance model could give Work and Income more incentive to focus on its long-term future "liability" to pay beneficiaries who stayed on its books.

"If, for example, with the sickness and invalid benefits you had far greater focus on identifying the unfunded liability, possibly you could get a change in behaviour," she said.

"I'm not sure at this stage whether you have to think differently about the institutional arrangements, but certainly you have to change the delivery model."

Personalised case management for beneficiaries was introduced in 1996 at the same time as "agreements" between beneficiaries and their case managers on what they would do to seek work.

Beneficiary advocate Kay Brereton said many Work and Income offices created specialised teams for each of the main groups of beneficiaries - the unemployed, sole parents, and the sick and disabled.

Ms Reade, who was appointed chief operating officer of the new Auckland Super City this week, said there were now no casemanagers seeing only sickness and invalids' beneficiaries.

But she said beneficiaries could still request appointments with specific case managers.

Ms Brereton said Ms Reade had promised to tell the agency's call centre staff to start offering this as an option again.