Reducing crime

We support the social and justice sector efforts to reduce crime – particularly youth crime through our work with at-risk children and young people, and child and young offenders.

Integrity is at the core of how we work and it is vital that the people of New Zealand have confidence in the integrity of our staff and the welfare system. We respond strongly to instances of fraud so that only those entitled to welfare, superannuation and student support get it.

What we want to achieve

The Government Theme of Reducing Crime has two specific result areas. The Ministry contributes to the cross-agency response to Government Result Area Number 7 Reduce the rates of total crime, violent crime and youth crime and Government Result Area Number 8 Reduce reoffending.

We are working with at-risk children and young people who are more likely to progress to offending. The aim of this is to stop young, low-level offenders graduating to more serious offences, and improve outcomes for children and young people in the youth justice system.

We will deliver a zero-tolerance approach to external fraud. We want all New Zealanders to know that we take theft of taxpayers’ money seriously. 

Specifically, in our context, we will deliver on Ministry Outcomes: 

• Fewer children and young people commit crime
• Fewer people commit fraud and the system is fair and sustainable.

Fewer children and young people commit crime

Linking it all together

Government Theme	Reducing Crime
Ministry Outcome	Fewer children and young people commit crime
Ministry Intermediate Outcomes	More young offenders are in education, training or employment	Fewer child offenders enter the youth justice system	Fewer young people re-enter the youth justice system	More young offenders are aware of the impact of their offending
Ministry Interventions	Work intensively with young people on family group conference plans and supervision orders to place them in work, education or training	Identify and address the underlying causes of the young person's offending behaviour	Provide all young offenders in youth justice residences with individual transition plans for re-integration into their communities	Encourage victim participation in family group conferences
Ministry Output Expenses that Contribute	Vote Social Development Administration of Trialling New Approaches to Social Sector Change Development and Funding of Community Services Family and Community Services Management of Service Cards (MCOA) Planning, Correspondence and Monitoring Promoting Positive Outcomes for Disabled People Social Policy Advice (MCOA) Tailored Sets of Services to Help People into Work or Achieve Independence Youth Justice Service

Fewer children and young people commit crime

Young people who commit offences should be held to account, but they also need the right support and interventions to address their offending behaviour and turn their lives around. We will help young offenders get back on track towards productive adult lives.

The next three years

To help young people who have broken the law return to a positive path, we will work with them intensively over a sustained period of time.

Focusing more closely on identifying and addressing the underlying causes of a young person’s offending has a greater chance of making real change. We can better target our support by managing young people on the basis of their risk to the community and themselves, and what needs to be done to reduce that risk.

Our relationships across the sector will be smarter, more co-ordinated and more open to achieve better results. This will include information sharing, shared reporting and expectations of outcomes.

youth crime action plan…

We will continue to work with the Ministry of Justice, the New Zealand Police, Te Puni Kōkiri, the Department of Corrections and the Ministries of Health, and Education to develop a Youth Crime Action Plan. The plan will build on what we have learnt over the past 10 years and is expected to be finalised in 2013. It will ensure that the services we have in place are aligned to prevent offending and reoffending behavior of young people. Together we can address difficulties facing young offenders and their families, such as unemployment, limited ability for parents and families to provide appropriate support, and inter-generational problems.

Working more closely with the Police means that young offenders who appear before the Youth Court may spend less time in the Court system. Young offenders will also receive more timely interventions to address their offending behaviour and make early, sustainable exits from the youth justice system.

programmes and services for young people…

The Fresh Start suite of programmes are a key lever to work with at-risk youth. We will continue to strengthen the effectiveness of programmes through better practice guidance. Working alongside providers to strengthen contract requirements and improve service delivery along with close monitoring of outcomes will also improve performance.

The improvements provided under the Services for Children in Care package have the potential to reduce the flow of these children and young people into the youth justice system.

response to child offenders…

We are focused on preventing child offending and addressing the related vulnerabilities of child offenders. Work is underway across the Ministry, the Ministry of Justice and Police to improve early identification of, and effective responses to children who offend.

We will continue to lead the Government’s response to the select committee inquiry into child offenders, working with the Police, and the Family Court to stop the flow of children into the youth justice system.

Government Result Area Number 8 Reduce reoffending informs a number of actions for the Ministry’s youth crime work. These include better information sharing, improved family group conferences and better responses to children coming into the justice system.

New approaches for early intervention are being tested at five Child, Youth and Family sites as part of this strategy.

Supervision with Activity programmes…

Supervision with Activity Court orders have proved effective. We will continue to monitor the number and results of Supervision with Activity orders to provide young offenders with plans to address their risks and needs.

Most young people will remain in their communities with a variety of support systems in place to help them manage their behaviour. Others will start their plans with short residential programmes, targeting the underlying causes of their offending so that they get out of their cycle of offending.

structure and routine for offenders…

The Military-style Activity Camp (MAC) programme currently targets the most serious, youth recidivist offenders, when other options have been exhausted.

We deliver this programme in partnership with the New Zealand Defence Force and community social services providers. We will continue to work closely with the New Zealand Defence Force to get the best outcomes for youth offenders.

We will continue to monitor and review MAC outcomes to inform and improve future programmes. For example mentoring is now provided as part of MAC transition plans.

underlying causes of offending…

Every child or young person undergoing a youth justice family group conference, or appearing at Youth Court, will have their needs identified and a plan developed that responds to those needs.

This means child or young offenders get the services they need, including mentoring and drug and alcohol programmes, and their families get parenting support to help their young people stay on track.

We will ensure that child and youth offenders who also have care and protection concerns get the range of support and services to fully address their needs.

reintegrating young offenders back into communities…

We work with young people in our youth justice residences by providing them with a safe place and support to get their life together.

Every young person entering a youth justice residence will have their needs identified and a plan developed that responds to those needs, including transition to work, education or training when they leave.

Expert clinicians and professionals help us to implement evidence-based best practice interventions and programmes to reduce the likelihood of young people reoffending.

Residential staff are being trained in motivational interviewing, a technique which has been evaluated and shown to support reduced recidivism.

supporting innovation…

A number of our providers are looking at new ways of working with Māori offenders, who are overrepresented in the youth offending statistics.

Working with young Māori offenders is a priority under the Child, Youth and Family Strategic Plan (Mā mātou, mā tātou: Changing young lives) and the Youth Crime Action Plan. We are exploring ways that local community groups can fully participate in our responses to youth offending.

We will better support victims to enable them to fully participate in the youth justice process, including increased levels of victim attendance and participation in family group conferences. We have also contributed to work being led by the Minister of Justice on a Victims’ Code.

How we will demonstrate success

We will know that we have achieved our outcome when the rates of youth crime and reoffending have reduced.

We will contribute to Government Result Area Number 7 Reduce the rates of total crime, violent crime and youth crime and Government Result Area Number 8 Reduce reoffending.

To be accountable and demonstrate our progress, we will use short and long-term measures to track our achievement. Our short-term performance will be measured against the performance measures in our key accountability documents.

Fewer people commit fraud and the system is fair and sustainable

Linking it all together

Government Theme	Reducing Crime
Ministry Outcome	Fewer people commit fraud and the system is fair and sustainable
Ministry Intermediate Outcomes	Fewer people are able to commit fraud	Fraud is detected sooner	Fewer fraud overpayments are made	More fraud overpayments are recovered
Ministry Interventions	Enhance our fraud strategy to better detect, investigate and prosecute fraud Work closely with a range of other agencies to take a whole-of-goverment approach to welfare fraud Treat fraudsters who are still on benefit more strictly by requiring additional verification and compliance checks	Enhance our suite of data matches to ensure higher levels of client compliance Undertake additional risk profiling activity and use this for proactive integrity interventions	Enhance our fraud strategy to better detect, investigate and prosecute fraud Work closely with a range of other agencies to take a whole-of-government approach to welfare fraud Undertake additional risk profiling activity and use this for proactive integrity interventions	Recover more fraud debt by taking action to increase repayment rates to repay what is owed
Ministry Output Expenses that Contribute	Vote Social Development Collection of Balances Owed by Former Clients and Non-beneficiaries Services to Protect the Integrity of the Benefit System Social Policy Advice (MCOA) Tailored Sets of Services to Help People into Work or Achieve Independence

Fewer people commit fraud and the system is fair and sustainable

We take fraud seriously. We will continually review and adapt the actions we take to prevent, detect and investigate fraud.

The next three years

implementing fraud reforms…

Making it difficult for people to defraud taxpayers, making it easier to catch those who do, and increasing the likelihood of recovering debt caused by fraud remains our priority over the next three years. 

Starting from 1 July 2013, we will progressively implement Fraud Reform changes. New measures will ensure that social assistance is only provided to those who meet the eligibility criteria and that applicants understand their obligations. 

A new way to work with low-trust beneficiaries who have previously acted dishonestly will also be introduced. 

People who fall into this group will have their ability to ‘self-serve’ removed and will be required to do more to prove their circumstance. This includes: 

• being assigned to a specific case manager
• having to complete all transactions face-to-face
• having their access to complete online transactions removed and access to online services and
  information limited
• being required to provide validation of information for each transaction, including verification of income and cash assets.

These changes will apply to beneficiaries who have acted dishonestly in their dealings with us, and have been convicted of welfare fraud or have an overpayment established following an investigation. 

more tools to recover fraudulent debt…

Pending legislative changes being passed successfully by Government, the fraud reforms will provide us with more tools to ensure that offenders, who are convicted of fraud, are made to pay back their debt.

The new tools to increase fraud debt collection will include:

• greater use of Police Asset Recovery teams to seize assets to repay debts
• the use of reparation orders in most prosecution cases. This puts some/all of the fraud debt into the Ministry of Justice to collect with all their powers including stopping non-payers at the border and their debtors being credit checked
• debt sharing of relationship fraud debts. The approach for relationship fraud will be strengthened, including holding the spouse or partner of a beneficiary liable for the fraud. This change will see both partners held to account for their offending.

We anticipate that these legislative changes will result in money owed to the Crown being repaid quicker.

enhancing current practice…

Where we can, we will take a proactive multi-agency approach to fraud that will involve a more collaborative work programme with key agencies when it comes to identifying and investigating cases of fraud.

To improve our ability to detect welfare fraud and correct benefit entitlements more quickly for those beneficiaries that have income, we are phasing in a new information sharing system between Inland Revenue and the Ministry. This will capture beneficiaries’ changes in employment and income earlier and more comprehensively through a streamlined process. Starting with working age beneficiaries, we will then include students, seniors and other types of income including earnings from self-employment, interest and dividends, and rental income.

We anticipate that, in the short-term, we will find more instances of fraud as we implement the new information sharing system with Inland Revenue. However, over time, we expect this to reduce as the information provided becomes near real-time. This will, in turn, reduce compliance costs across the system.

risk-based profiling…

Where there is a likelihood of fraud, risk-based profiling helps us to respond. Continuing our focus on removing barriers that impede investigating and prosecuting cases of fraud is also a priority.

We share information daily with the Department of Corrections, and weekly with the Department of Internal Affairs, the Accident Compensation Corporation, Inland Revenue, New Zealand Customs Service and Housing New Zealand. We will continue to enhance our data matching with government agencies.

How we will demonstrate success

We will know that we have achieved our outcome when fewer people are committing fraud, fraud is identified earlier and debt recovery is increased.

We will continually adapt and improve the measures we have in place to prevent, detect and investigate internal and external fraud.

We will contribute to Government Result Area Number 7 Reduce the rates of total crime, violent crime and youth crime and Government Result Area Number 8 Reduce reoffending. 

To be accountable and demonstrate our progress, we will use short and long-term measures to track our achievement. Our short-term performance will be measured against the performance measures in our key accountability documents.

*New indicator for 2013/2014