Disabled people are being asked to trust a system that will not answer straight questions

By Nick Ruane

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Around 25,000 disabled people and their whānau rely on Individualised Funding to run their own lives.

It is the mechanism that lets a disabled person employ their own support workers, set their own hours, and make their own decisions — its the closest thing our disability support system has to genuine choice and control. It is administered by ten contracted Host providers, and last year it cost $409 million.

That figure comes from the Ministry of Social Development itself, released to me under the Official Information Act.

It has nearly doubled in four years, up from $216 million in 2022. One provider, Manawanui, now accounts for around $259 million — almost two-thirds of the entire market.

You might expect that a funding model growing at that pace, concentrated to that degree, would be the subject of careful analysis. The Ministry says otherwise.

In its response to my request, it confirmed that it:

“…has not conducted a detailed analysis of the IF Host model relative to alternative modes.”

So, no value-for-money assessment. No comparison of per-client administration costs against other ways of doing this. Nothing.

And yet the ground is moving. The Ministry has quietly renewed all ten Host contracts through to June 2028, with a right of renewal to 2029. It told me this extension exists “to ensure continuity of service while work progresses on the future of the system,” and that “policy work is underway to look at the shape of the disability support system in the long term,” including “consideration of future service design and contract structure.”

Read those words carefully. The Ministry is telling us, on the record, that the future design of Individualised Funding is being worked on right now. What it will not tell us is what that work says.

When I asked whether any analysis or advice exists on reducing, phasing out, or replacing the Host model — including a centralised, government-run alternative — the Ministry refused every question on the basis that the information “does not exist.”

A live policy programme on the long-term shape of the system, which the Ministry itself confirms is underway, has apparently produced not a single document touching the administration of a $409 million funding stream.

Disabled people should, and infact anyone should find that difficult to believe. I have referred the matter to the Ombudsman.

This is where the Disability Support Services Bill matters. The Bill, currently before Parliament, sets a statutory framework and then hands the real detail — the operational settings that determine how support actually works — to secondary legislation, to be developed after the Bill has passed.

The Ministry confirmed this architecture to me directly: the detailed provisions “will be developed following enactment.”

In plain terms, the decisions that will shape how disabled people access and control their funding will be made through instruments that receive a fraction of the scrutiny applied to primary legislation, after the parliamentary debate is over.

The Ministry points to public consultations held in late 2024 and early 2025, and those consultations were real: more than 3,000 people, myself included, participated across the two rounds. But they covered flexible funding in general terms.

Nobody was consulted on the future of the Host model specifically, because, officially, there is no work on the future of the Host model to consult on. The consultation happened before the questions were asked; the answers will be written after the public’s role has ended.

Then there is the matter of time. My request was lodged on 5 June. The Official Information Act gives agencies twenty working days — a deadline that expired on 3 July. On 2 July, one working day before that deadline, a Ministry staff member emailed me seeking an extension and setting out the Ministry's reasons.

I accepted that explanation twenty minutes later. I am not suggesting the Ministry breached the Act by taking an extension — it is entitled to under section 15A, and I agreed to it. What the timeline does show is an agency operating right at the outer edge of what the law permits: the extension was sought only after the original deadline had almost run out, and the response itself did not arrive until 21 July.

For me as an individual advocate, that is an irritation. For the disabled community, it is a pattern — not of unlawful delay, but of a system that treats statutory timeframes as a target to be hit rather than a standard to be met.

The Act exists, in its own words, to enable more effective public participation in the making and administration of laws and policies. Every late response, every “does not exist” that sits alongside an admission that the work is underway, hollows out that purpose at precisely the moment participation matters most — while a Bill is live and a system is being redesigned.

The social model of disability teaches us that people are disabled not by their impairments but by the barriers society builds around them. Opacity is a barrier. When a Ministry re-designs the architecture of disabled people’s daily lives behind a wall of refused requests and post-enactment regulation, it further disables the community’s capacity to participate in decisions about its own future — a capacity that the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which New Zealand ratified, through Article 21 Access to Information.

I am not arguing that the Host model is perfect, or that it should be preserved unchanged. There are legitimate questions about cost, concentration, and design, and the Ministry’s own figures give weight to them.

I am arguing something simpler: that a Government reshaping a $409 million system on which 25,000 disabled people depend owes those people its working. Show us the analysis.

Tell us what options are on the table. Answer requests within the timeframes the law sets. And put the significant design decisions where they belong — in front of Parliament and the public, not in regulations drafted after the debate has closed.

Disabled people have spent decades earning the right to choice and control over our own support. We should not have to lodge Ombudsman complaints to find out whether we are about to lose it.