Nicola Willis: Finance Minister plans to adjust FamilyBoost after IRD gets eligibility numbers wrong

The Finance Minister is preparing to tweak the Family Boost payment plan, admitting IRD had the wrong numbers on eligible families.

Data to April 9 reveals 249 families received the maximum payment of $975 dollars a quarter - since the scheme came into effect last year. 

Nicola Willis had said 21,000 families were eligible when launching the policy, but now concedes the modelling was wrong.

She says she wants to make sure families in need get the money.

"We put aside hundreds of millions of dollars for this policy because the uptake has been lower than the IRD basically estimated - we're not on track to actually get all that money out the door."

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Afternoon. It turns out that way fewer families have been
receiving National's main elections sweetener than they estimated. So they
said it would be twenty one thousand families who would
qualify for the seventy five dollars a week reback for
early childhood education, but actually it's just two hundred and
forty nine families who get it consistently. The Finance Minister,
Nikola Willis is with us. Nikola, Hello, I'm.

Speaker 2 (00:19):
Going to have to correct you here the please do
Actually fifty six thousand families have benefited from the scheme
so far, and more than seventy thousand have registered for
the scheme, so it maybe about to make claims. And
what iid estimated and what we based our communications on
was that around one hundred thousand families would be eligible

(00:40):
for the scheme over the full year. We haven't completed
a year yet, so we do expect more families will
claim over the next few weeks and months. And families
do have up to four years to make claims for
the scheme, so some who are eligible for it may
not have made claims yet, so we're hopeful that there
will still be many more thousands of families that will

(01:01):
benefit from the scheme.

Speaker 1 (01:02):
Is it wrong the reportage that I'm reading that says
two hundred and forty nine families have consistently claimed the
full amounts since the scheme began last July.

Speaker 2 (01:12):
So what is correct is that fewer families than IRD
estimated have got the full amount of the claim, which
is for nine hundred and seventy five dollars every three months.
And that's because fewer families that IRD estimated are actually
paying more than three hundred dollars a week for early
childhood education costs. That's how much they have to pay

(01:35):
to be eligible for the full rebate, because the rebate
is based on how much you're paying an ECE fees
and what your household income is. And essentially IRD thought
that there were more people paying half fees than has
turned out to be the case. So we're now having
a look at the scheme. We always intended that these
dollars that we've put aside for family boost would end

(01:56):
up with families and their bank accounts helping them with
the cost of so I've asked IID for advice on
what are the tweaks we could make to make sure
that more people are benefiting more from this scheme.

Speaker 1 (02:06):
Okay, so you'll prepare to tweak it so actually more
people get it rather than bank the savings and use
it for something else.

Speaker 2 (02:12):
Yes, because the government's intention was really clear. We think
that that time in life when you've got young children,
you've got high costs, is really tough, and that's when
the cost of loving bite's hard. And if you're working
and you're paying tax, we think giving you a little
bit of a boost to help with your early childhood
education costs is the right thing to do. We put
aside hundreds of millions of dollars for this policy. Because

(02:35):
the uptake has been lower than iid estimated, we're not
on track to actually get all that money out the door.
I want it in the back pockets of mums and
dads who need it, So that will require some tweaks
to the scheme, and I'm taking advice on what those
should be.

Speaker 1 (02:50):
Do you have any idea how much money you've saved
across this.

Speaker 2 (02:54):
It's difficult to estimate because, as I say, it hasn't
even been running for a year yet, and the budget
is forecast over the next four years. But at this
point we are not on track to have spent the
full one hundred and seventy one million dollars that we
were meant to be spending this year. So I want
to make sure that we're making tweaks so that in

(03:16):
future years we are getting this out the door to
more people.

Speaker 1 (03:20):
I'm assuming the tweak's going to be in the budget.

Speaker 2 (03:21):
Yeah, No. What we've done for the budget has made
sure that all the funding we initially put to one
side for the scheme is ring fenced, still available for
Family Boost. And then as we're continuing to track this
data that's still coming in, continuing to get claims, I
am at the same time taking advice on tweaks to
the scheme and I think that I will make some

(03:42):
announcements on that after the budget, probably in June.

Speaker 1 (03:45):
Okay, cool, Hey, thank you very much as always for
your time. That's Nikolalla is the Finance Minister.

Speaker 2 (03:49):
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