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A disability service provider is furious with the government for what it says is a negligible increase in funding, even though a big deal has been made on the extra money in the May budget.
By RNZ reporter Hamish Cardwell
The Government announced a record increase in support services for persons with disabilities of $ 832.5 million.
CCS Disability Action CEO David Matthews said the industry has now been told that providers were only getting a 1 percent increase in funding for their services.
He said that amount was an insult.
“I have been in the industry for 20 years and I have never been as angry as today.
“We weren’t expecting everything to be fixed, but we were hoping for a positive signal to acknowledge the historic underfunding we have experienced.”
Matthews said that most years his contract prices did not increase at all, or only a very small amount, but the cost of running his organization increases about 3-4 percent annually.
“So every year we have lost ground, we think that in the last 10 years we have gone [backwards], in terms of the real purchasing power of our financing, about 15 percent.
“So this time we hoped that the Government through the [Ministry of Health] would have started to narrow that gap. “
He said his staff received praise for their commitment to keeping services up and running during the Covid shutdown.
“This increase is an insult in terms of the contribution that this organization and my dedicated staff made to disabled people in New Zealand during those many weeks.”
Matthews said at least two of his contracts were now in serious jeopardy and that he will need to reassess the viability of all of his contracts.
He said he was on file for praising the government for increasing funding, and is now very disappointed.
Matthews said CCS’s operating deficit meant they would have to continue to rely on donations to stay afloat.
“There comes a time when we simply cannot continue to subsidize the government in relation to providing support to people with disabilities.”
Deputy Health Minister Jenny Salesa said the additional money was the largest funding increase for the sector in history.
He said the money would be spent over five years and was to cover the rising cost of providing disability support services and acknowledges the expected growth in demand for services and rising costs.
Salesa said the new money meant the Health Ministry could provide the first sweeping price increase for disability support services in years.
She said that $ 1.7 billion is spent on disability support services each year.
