Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee, , 5:35:02 to 5:39:09
NDIA officials provide statistics on plan reassessments over the last 12 months, detailing the number of plans that increased versus those that decreased in value.
Topics: Social services, Government spending
Speakers: Scott McNaughton, Senator Penny Allman-Payne, Blair Comley
So my first question is in the last in the in the 12 months period up to now, um, how many people have had cuts to their NDIS budgets under plan changes?
I'll ask the agency to comment on that.
Thank you.
Hello, Senator Scott McNorton, Deputy CEO of Service Delivery at the National Discovery Insurance Agency. Um was it the last 12 months you said Senator, so I can get the date range correctly?
Yeah, in basically 12 months to now.
Sure. So over the last 12 months, uh Senator, um we've had 119,976 plan reviews that resulted in an increase to their plan to a total value of 5.558 million dollars in increases? And we've had 72,018 plan reassessments that resulted in a decrease to the plans to a value of 2.089 million.
Okay, thank you.
Um billion, sorry, can I correct that on the record? They were billions. Billions. 2.089 billion and 5.558 billion.
Okay, thank you. Um now my next question is how many people have had plan reassessments in that 12 months? So I'm imagining there might be some that had no change, which would mean the number might be a bit higher than those two together?
Yeah, that's correct, Senator. One of the other data points we track is the total number of reassessments. So we look at of those numbers in total, about 100,000 um participants had uh a variation that increased their plan by more than 5%. Um we had around 55,000 people that had a reduction of more than 5%, and then the gap in between is people that had a roundabout the same plan or their plan increased due to CPI or had a sort of a net increase or decrease of around 5%.
Okay, so in total, how many people would have had their plan reassessed in in the 12-month period to now?
The total reassessments was a combination of the two figures I gave you before, which was 119,976 plus the 72,018.
Okay, so there were none that had no change.
That's the total number altogether of the reassessments we did, Senator.
Okay, thank you. Um are you expecting um that the number of plan changes that have been reassessed down will increase as the NDIS changes come into effect? And have you have you got an idea like if you modelled or any analysis around what you think that will look like in the next 12 months?
Uh Senator, the two parts of that question. One is obviously when we're reassessing anyone's plan, we're reassessing it based on their individual circumstances. So plans may go up or plans may go down based on their individual circumstances. Um we still see proportionally more plans go up based on on people's needs changing, but people's plans may also go down based on on uh their own circumstances as people might build capacity or they no longer need high cost AT supports or home modifications in one plan, it doesn't need to be in the next plan, etc. So there are often sort of um cycles within plans as well, where plans do go up and plans do go down. If you're asking more broadly around the reforms down the pipeline, um maybe the department might not might want to go to those, but there's also the support determinations in place at the moment, but for current planning framework, it is a reasonable and necessary decision that we're making with each plan that we're doing, and plans will go up and plans will go down based on individual circumstances.
So maybe a question for the department. Um is the expectation that the proportion of plans that go down will increase once the changes come into effect.