Nicola Willis: Social Investment Minister on the funding of organisations to help at-risk youth

There’s confidence the Social Investment Fund is assisting organisations that will effectively help at-risk youth. 

It's allocating $50 million into programmes for children with parents in prison, those who’ve grown up in care, and under-13s suspended from school. 

Social Investment Minister Nicola Willis told Mike Hosking they're taking a different approach to previous governments, which spent billions of dollars with no results. 

She says they're using data, measuring outcomes, and holding organisations accountable – adding the fund will be scaled up, if it works. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
You might remember, the government created a Social Investment Fund
started with one hundred and ninety million. Fifty of that's
about to be handed out. We've got seven programs covering
kids from newborns to adulthood are covered in this. Nicola
Willis as the Minister for Social Investment and is with us.
Good morning, Good morning mate. The demand vsupply curve, you've
got a lot more demand than you have supply.

Speaker 2 (00:21):
That's right. But we've also got a government, over successive
governments that spends billions of dollars trying to intervene to
stop people having bad lives. Hasn't been very successful at
it in many cases, hasn't used data, en us, hasn't
contracted well. We're taking a completely new approach, using data,

(00:41):
measuring outcomes, holding organizations accountable for their results, and if
we prove that it works, then we scale it up.

Speaker 1 (00:48):
How confident are you sitting here this morning that it
will work materially.

Speaker 2 (00:52):
Well with each of these groups. The first thing we've
done is say who are you going to target? That's
not always the case in government contracts, and we've narrowed
it down to three groups who we know intervening really
really makes a difference. For that's kids whose parents have
already or have recently been in jail, kids whose parents
have been in the orring and tamariki system, and kids

(01:14):
have been stood down or suspended from school before they're thirteen.
We know that those kids, if you inter ben early,
you can make a big difference. The second thing we've
done is we're working with organizations who are prepared to
be measured on the outcomes that they get for every
person that they're engaging, and we're using a comparison data set,
so they're prepared to be compared with, well, what happens

(01:34):
to kids who aren't working with your organization, And we're
going to work with those organizations to monitor it. So
I'm confident we will have much better information about what
we're actually getting for our money with each of these programs. Now,
there is a risk, Mike, that one of them doesn't
actually deliver what they thought they would or said they would.
The good thing here is the data will tell us that,

(01:55):
and we'll say, Okay, well that's that contract. We won't
be renewing that in future.

Speaker 1 (01:58):
Will we should? I be, because in reading about it yesterday,
I'm metting up the number of kids one twenty two
hundred and two hundred and four to fifteen one hundred
and I know this is just early days, but it's
eleven hundred Dish kids in this country. How many kids
are there in this country that need interference from the
state to sort their lives out because they've been born
into dire circumstances.

Speaker 2 (02:18):
Well, I would say that that number would be in
the thousands. What I'd say is that there are also
interventions on a small scale that can be effective early.
So let's think about this. If you put thirty five
thousand dollars into a child early, you sort them out,
you're going to save yourself, not only the hundreds of

(02:39):
thousands you could spend on boot camps and prison sentences.
You're going to save the impact to society that occurs
when they victimize other kids. But actually, these are children
who are perfectly capable of being contributing citizens, of having
good jobs, of paying tax, of contributing to their family
life and their community life. So I think free child

(03:00):
who we turn around effectively with an intervention that works
as a child worth working for.

Speaker 1 (03:06):
Good stuff, Go well. Nicholas Willison for more from the
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