Funding arrangements

We conducted an analysis of whether the Crown alone should fund the scheme or the institutions responsible for the abuse should fund it. In the end, we concluded the best option would be for the Crown to assume full responsibility for funding the scheme upfront. The Crown would meet the cost of contributions from State agencies and cover those from indirect State care providers and faith-based institutions. This would ensure there was no delay between a decision on a claim and a payment to a survivor, even if the responsible institution no longer existed, had no funds to pay or was not in the scheme. The Crown or the scheme would then obtain contributions from institutions and indirect State care providers on a case-by-case basis.

Each participating organisation would obviously have to reimburse the Crown or the scheme for financial payments awarded for abuse in its care – provided, of course, it was the only organisation named in the claim. Those designing the puretumu torowhānui scheme will need to decide how to apportion financial payments awarded for abuse in more than one institution. They will also need to determine how – and how often – to collect this money and also how to apportion the scheme’s administration costs and the costs of oranga services.

From an administrative perspective, it would be much simpler if the Crown were to fully fund the scheme, but many survivors, rightly in our view, said institutions responsible for abuse should face the consequences of their actions or inactions, and a very tangible way to do this was by making them pay for survivors’ puretumu torowhānui. This would also avoid the public having to pay for the wrongdoing of non-government institutions. 

In Australia’s National Redress Scheme, institutions’ contributions are required only after each claim has been decided. This can be a drawn-out and administratively complex process, particularly if a claim involves more than one institution. In Ireland, religious institutions were required to make their total contributions upfront in exchange for indemnity from civil liability. However, the number of survivors who made claims was a lot higher than estimated, with the result that taxpayers had to fund the difference.

For this reason, we consider contributions should not be required at the outset. The open-ended nature of the scheme and the difficulty in estimating total costs make this approach inaccurate and risky. Contributions on a regular basis would entail higher administration costs but also greater accuracy and certainty. This approach would also ultimately best meet the needs of survivors.

Contributions from charities

Many faith-based institutions are charities whose constitution or trust deed may not permit financial contributions to a new puretumu torowhānui scheme, even if those institutions wish to contribute financially to it. The same may apply to some indirect State care providers. And even if the constitution or trust deed permits contributions, trustees or board members may not deem it in a charity’s best interests to do so because they do not know the full extent of their liability – that is, how long they will have to go on making contributions and how big those contributions will be – and they may decide such contributions threaten the charity’s long-term viability. In these circumstances, trustees or board members may be unwilling to make contributions, despite accepting the charity has a moral obligation to provide redress to those abused while in its care. In Scotland, legislation was passed to treat charities’ financial contributions to its redress scheme as consistent with their purpose and constitution. Ireland adopted a similar approach. The same could be considered here.

Recommendations

62.  The Crown should have overall responsibility for funding the puretumu torowhānui scheme so survivors receive financial payments in a timely manner. 

63.  Faith-based institutions and indirect State care providers should contribute to the scheme’s funding.

64.  Those designing the puretumu torowhānui scheme should determine how the Crown or the scheme should collect financial payments awarded against individual faith-based institutions and indirect State care providers and how to apportion the scheme’s costs including the costs of oranga services.  

Responsive service delivery

The quality, suitability and accessibility of the oranga services that survivors use, both when making a claim and as part of their puretumu torowhānui, will be a significant factor in how well survivors recover from abuse and rebuild their lives. Many survivors will need face-to-face interaction with the puretumu torowhānui scheme and support services. We consider the scheme should, in facilitating support services for survivors, give preference to service providers with the knowledge and skills needed to interact with survivors, particularly Māori, Pacific, Deaf and disabled survivors. It should ensure oranga services available to survivors include services run by Māori, particularly since by-Māori, for-Māori services are an expression of tino rangatiratanga. There should also be Pacific service providers, and other service providers with Māori, Pacific and disabled people among their workforces.  

The scheme itself will require a skilled and diverse workforce, including people with lived experience of the challenges survivors face. It should ensure its workforce includes Māori, Pacific, Deaf and disabled people, and staff members should be trained in dealing with survivors so interactions are safe, welcoming and culturally appropriate. Staff at all points of contact with survivors will need a sound understanding of the impact of trauma, including historical and culture-specific trauma.

Trauma-trained professionals are in short supply. Psychologists to help with mental health and addiction issues, particularly those from Māori and Pacific communities, are also scarce, even though the Government Inquiry into Mental Health and Addiction recommended the Government significantly increase access to publicly funded mental health and addiction services.

The Crown will need to develop a workforce change strategy as well as provide resourcing for training and skills development to ensure a suitably qualified workforce is available to support survivors in a trauma-informed and culturally responsive way. A strategy will be needed to develop these and other relevant skills among survivors, Māori, Pacific peoples and disabled people.

The scheme is one way the Crown will give disabled survivors access to justice. But this can only happen if disabled survivors have effective and equitable access to the scheme on an equal basis. For some disabled survivors, this will require access to supports and other measures. Those doing scheme-related work should have training on the rights of disabled people. Disabled people should be among those developing and delivering this training.

Recommendations

65.  The puretumu torowhānui scheme and any other funders should encourage the provision of support services locally by giving preference to collectives within communities in the design and delivery of support services, recognising the specific obligations under te Tiriti o Waitangi for Māori, while the Crown should properly resource local services, which may include:

• extra resourcing to service providers, such as holistic Whānau Ora health providers or iwi, to increase their capability and capacity
• commissioning new support services, particularly where gaps have been identified.

66.  The Crown and the puretumu torowhānui scheme should ensure sufficiently skilled workforces are available to provide oranga services to survivors, and that all those who have contact with survivors, including scheme staff, advocates, navigators and lawyers, are trauma-informed and culturally responsive. This will require the Crown to have a transformative workforce change strategy and resourcing training and workforce skill development, including:

• providing incentives and additional and ongoing skills training to workforces
• developing and making mandatory training for those entering relevant workforces
• ensuring workforces receive awareness raising and training on the rights of disabled people, in particular:
  • disabled people’s rights to access to justice under article 13 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities
  • the inclusion of disabled people in the design and provision of this training
• a strategy for developing relevant skills among survivors and Māori, Pacific and disabled people to help relevant workforces to relate appropriately to survivors.

Reviews of oranga services

We have already described the types of oranga services the scheme would expect to offer to survivors. What is not clear is how many of these services are, in fact, available, whether there are gaps or overlaps in different parts of the country, the extent to which survivors are already using them, whether there are any deficiencies in these services and what it would cost to plug any gaps in the current range.

The Crown Response to the Abuse in Care Royal Commission of Inquiry, the co-ordinating body for the State agencies taking part in our inquiry, said none of its member agencies had examined the extent to which survivors used existing oranga services, and none had conducted any recent stocktake of such services. The Government runs a searchable online database of services or programmes available to help families. We found it contained about 5,700 providers of potentially relevant services. However, we also found another 300 not listed on the directory during a preliminary search. 

An immediate review or stocktake is plainly needed to get a picture of what is available, and also whether there is already high demand for these services. The report of the Government Inquiry into Mental Health and Addiction suggests this may be so, at least in the mental health area. It found many people with common problems such as stress, depression, anxiety, trauma and substance abuse had few options for help through the public health system.

The Crown should undertake such a stocktake, which should also look at any eligibility criteria, costs, the training and qualifications of those providing the services, and any extra training required to ensure the services offer consistently high-quality, trauma-informed support. In addition, it should consider questions such as regional disparities, delays, barriers to access, whether Māori, Pacific peoples and disabled people experience any difficulty with them. Following the Crown’s stocktake, the Māori Collective and the Purapura Ora Collective should commission an expert review of these services to:

• evaluate whether there are gaps in services and what improvements are needed to existing services, including to their workforces
• evaluate how well these services meet the needs of survivors, particularly Māori, Pacific peoples and disabled people, and what if any extra services or improvements in services are needed
• determine how many survivors are likely to need these services and for how long
• evaluate whether:
  • any extra funding and training will be needed to ensure enough services are Māori-led
  • front-line staff are able to provide culturally appropriate support and have a clear understanding of Māori models of wellbeing
  • there is appropriate training for providers about disabled people and information about the services is accessible to disabled people
  • services are accessible to deaf people
  • service providers understand the cultural needs of Pacific survivors, particularly in seeking out and using their services
• recommend:
  • any changes needed to make services suitable for survivors
  • any extra services needed to meet best-practice standards, be survivor-focused and trauma-informed, and communicate effectively with other services for survivors
  • whether priority needs to be given to survivors in accessing these services
• recommend what monitoring and review arrangements should be put in place to help ensure services remain high-quality.

The review should also consider whether to establish a dedicated fund to pay for any extra services or improvement to services and to cover monitoring and review costs.

Both reviews should be completed well in advance of final decisions about the shape of the scheme because it is essential these oranga services, which will be an integral part of most survivors’ puretumu torowhānui packages, are in place by the time the scheme begins operating.

Recommendations

67.  The Crown should immediately commission a stocktake of available oranga services for survivors, including counselling and other psychological care, educational services and vocational services.

68.  The Māori Collective, in conjunction with the Purapura Ora Collective, should commission an expert review to evaluate the services identified in the stocktake and make recommendations on any changes or extra services needed.  This should be completed well in advance of final decisions on the scheme. 

69.  The Crown should consider establishing a dedicated fund for any extra services or improvements to services recommended by the expert review, along with any independent monitoring and review arrangements. 

Communication channels

The way institutions exchange information and records about survivors is slow and inefficient, and we would not want to see this inefficiency replicated in the way the scheme works. The puretumu torowhānui scheme needs to have simple, direct communication channels with participating institutions to minimise any delays. In Ireland, each institution in which the abuse took place nominated a person to receive notifications and communications from the Residential Institutions Board Redress Board, which simplified the exchange of information between the institution and the scheme. A streamlined approach is particularly vital for institutions with numerous associated entities because it can otherwise be extremely difficult to identify the correct institution to respond to a claim, and to make contributions to redress. To illustrate the problem, the Catholic Church has 49 entities represented at our inquiry via its co-ordinating body, Te Rōpū Tautoko. If the scheme were required to deal with each of these to, for example, establish which was responsible for financial payments, its work would be greatly slowed. Another difficulty is that information about survivors is often held by numerous institutions. The establishment of Te Rōpū Tautoko was of great assistance to us, and the scheme needs to be similarly assisted.

Recommendations

70.  Each faith-based institution should establish or nominate an entity to provide a single point of contact with the puretumu torowhānui scheme and with other institutions in the scheme. The Crown should consider whether State agencies should each establish or nominate an entity for this purpose or whether one such entity should serve all State agencies.

Next: Wider Considerations