More effective social services inquiry update: November 2014

The Productivity Commission’s More effective social services inquiry aims to shed light on how commissioning and contracting influence the quality and effectiveness of social services, and to suggest actions government agencies and others could take to promote better outcomes in the future.

Consultation on the issues paper

The inquiry’s issues paper was released in October, and outlines the background to the inquiry, our intended approach and the matters about which we are seeking comment and information.

The paper asked a range of questions to help guide our consultation at this early stage of the inquiry and the inquiry team has so far met with a wide range of organisations, including government agencies, iwi, providers, community organisations and philanthropic funders to try and to better understand the issues.

Common themes emerging from these meetings include:
• everyone wants services to be effective for the people who use them
• agreeing what to use to measure impact is difficult
• the frustration that most funding comes with a lot of prescription about how services should be provided, with little scope for innovation or practice improvement by ‘doing and reviewing’ in collaboration
• the way that funding is implemented from the top down often leaves communities and providers feeling untrusted or not respected for the part they can play; iwi in particular feel their governance role could increase how effective services are, but that it is not used well in the present approach
• a desire for a system that allows for things to be achieved differently in different places, while maintaining consistent access and service quality for users, and
• there are challenges involved in delivering services to populations spread-out over a large area.
We will consider all the feedback we have received from our meetings as we develop our draft report, and we look forward to further engagement and discussion following its publication in March 2015.

Deadline fast approaching

Submissions help the Commission to gather ideas, opinions and information to ensure that our recommendations are credible and workable.

Submissions on the issues paper are invited by 2 December 2014. We will release a draft report in March 2015 and deliver the final report to Government in June 2015. You can make your submission via email or on our website.

Submissions received

We are pleased to report that we have received more than twenty submissions already. You can check out the public submissions on our website.

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