CPSU SUBMISSION
13 AUGUST 2021
Introduction
As the union representing people working in the National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA) and the NDIS Quality Safety Commission (NDISQSC), the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) welcomes the opportunity to make a submission on issues pertaining to the NDIS workforce.
Staffing levels at the NDIA and the NDISQSC have a direct impact on participant access and satisfaction with the NDIS with wider implications for the scheme. Staffing levels and arrangements must be part of broader deliberations around NDIS workforce matters.
Since our last submission to this Joint Standing Committee on the National Disability Insurance Scheme (Committee) in April 2020, concerns about agency operations and the restrictions that have been placed by the Commonwealth Government continue unaddressed.
These concerns are in no small part due to how the Average Staffing Level (ASL) cap is applied in the NDIA and the NDISQSC, which has led to:
- Understaffing;
- High levels of labour hire staff; and
- Workload related stress. For workers who identify with having a disability, these issues are magnified further. This is concerning given the NDIA’s aim to be an employer of choice for people with disabilities.
The ASL cap means that, despite the best efforts of staff across both the NDIA and NDISQSC, scheme participants and service providers are not always getting the level of support they should. Participants suffer the most from backlogs in decision making, subpar planning outcomes, relentless reviews of decisions to assembly-line style approvals which place the entire long-term financial viability of the scheme at risk. The CPSU submission to the Senate Inquiry into the current capability of the APS has also been attached as it further explores these issues.
This submission also makes recommendations for improvement, which include the removal of staffing caps for the NDIA and the NDISQSC, increasing the scope of the KPI review, and making genuine and reasonable adjustments for people with a disability.
Authorised and printed by Melissa Donnelly, Community and Public Sector Union (PSU Group), 7/191–199 Thomas St, Haymarket, NSW, 2000.
NDIA staffing
Understaffing
The NDIA continues to be plagued by understaffing. While the number of participants eligible for the scheme has progressively increased,1 the agency’s staffing numbers have stagnated. The NDIA was originally designed to have 10,595 APS staff in 2018-19 to properly deliver the scheme to participants.2 Five years since this announcement, the agency remains at half that number.
In October 2019, an increase to the NDIA’s ASL cap of 800 occurred after criticism that understaffing contributed to delays for participants in accessing their plans.3 According to NDIA senior management, the original intention of the increase was to resource several urgent priorities for the agency, including addressing the backlog in reviews, complaints4 and to increase the capacity for service delivery.5
The increase in the ASL cap was insufficient for meeting growing workloads. In August 2020, nearly a year after the ASL cap was increased, the NDIA released a strategy to deal with the continuing shortfall of staff in the service delivery space titled ‘Supporting Our Frontline’. The rationale for this plan was that:
“The Agency does not have the flexibility to continue adding resources, so will instead find the right support to redirect and reassign to those frontline areas through increased resourcing which will see mixed impacts across the Agency”.6
Shortfalls continue despite the Government previously acknowledging that understaffing is a cause of delay, the NDIA recently admitting there are no plans for an increase in ASL over the next two years.7 As a result, the NDIA has fallen short in addressing backlogs and capacity constraints at a significant cost to the wellbeing of staff and the quality of work for participants.
High levels of labour hire staff Insecure work is rife throughout the APS due to the ASL cap, the NDIA and NDISQSC no exception to this. The NDIA currently sources its over 1,400 contractors from 46 different labour hire suppliers.8 Each of these labour hire firms supplies workers on individual contracts, with most contracted on a casual basis. Their roles vary with many working for years on rolling contracts, with impacts that extend beyond the workplace, one staff member revealing:
“I was employed as a BSO Business Support Officer… through DFP recruitment in June 2018 after an extensive recruitment round in Aug/Sept 2017… (Being labour-hire) excludes people from applying
1 Most of WA only gained access to the scheme by mid-2020 https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/rp/rp1819/Quick_Guides/Nation alDisabilityInsuranceScheme 2 Commonwealth Government (2016, May). 2016-17 Budget Paper No.4 – Part 2: Staffing of Agencies. http://www.budget.gov.au/2016-17/content/bp4/html/09_staff.htm 3 Sally Whyte, 17 October 2019, Martin Hoffman appointed National Disability Insurance Agency CEO, Canberra Times. https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/6443093/ndia-gets-new-ceo-800-extra-staff/ 4 Agency Consultative Network Paper number 3, page 1, point 4 (d) 26-27/11/2019. 5 Ibid point 4 (e). 6 CPSU and NDIA Meeting, 26 August 2020, Page 5, point 6. 7 Finance and Public Administration References Committee, 21 July 2021, The current capability of the Australian Public Service
(APS)
8 Letter from Brad Nash on 20th of March 2020 to Beth Vincent-Pietsch.
for NDIA positions as well as not being able to access personal loans / home loans or other forms of credit.”
Figure 3.1 tracks the NDIA’s employment figures since the increase to the ASL cap was announced, from just prior to the cap being raised in October 2019 to March 2021. Overall staffing numbers for the NDIA have trended downwards, the most recent figures showing the NDIA had a smaller workforce in July 2021 than in March 2020.
The NDIA continues to have high levels of labour hire that make up around a quarter of the entire workforce. Due to the ASL cap, agencies must source workers from labour hire firms to make up for shortfalls in their workforce. This is despite labour hire costing more than directly engaging APS employee. Figure 3.1 shows this broadly inverse relationship between the recruitment of APS staff and usage of labour hire usage in the NDIA.
Figure 3.1. NDIA Staffing Levels (October 2019 to July 2021)
NDIA APS and labour hire staff numbers since ASL cap increase
5000 4392 4133
4500 4144 4062 4044
4000 3529 3500
3000
2331 2500
1475 2000 1744 1554 1438 1430 1500
1000
500
0
Oct-19 Nov-19 Dec-19 Jan-20 Feb-20 Mar-20 Apr-20 May-20 Jun-20 Jul-20 Aug-20 Sep-20 Oct-20 Nov-20 Dec-20 Jan-21 Feb-21 Mar-21 Apr-21 May-21 Jun-21 Jul-21
APS Labour-hire
These staffing arrangements create significant gaps in non-participant facing functions and reinforces a cycle of chronic understaffing. The NDIA is forced to engage in convoluted measures to fill gaps in its workforce by shifting workers from non-participant facing functions into service delivery when it would be cheaper to just directly hire more APS staff.
Workload related stress. Unsustainable workloads, driven by unrealistic Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and understaffing, are affecting the work health and safety of staff. According to the NDIA’s own data, from the months of March through to May 2020, the number of plans approved – when
compared to their projections for the same period – was over 131% for each month.9 2020 APS Census results for the NDIA confirmed these workload pressures, 71% of all NDIA staff stating they are working above capacity.10
Workloads are not a new issue Ongoing workload pressures are not a secret. The CPSU has raised concerns about the impact of staff workloads and KPIs at the NDIA on participants for some time now both with this Committee and the agency itself.
In April 2020, the CPSU made a submission to this Committee. A key driver for the submission was serious concerns for staff health and safety and the corresponding effect on work for participants, driven by unreasonable KPIs. As supplementary evidence in response to a Question on Notice, the CPSU provided a report collating survey responses from 935 NDIA staff, detailing how the pressure to meet KPIs was having an adverse impact on mental health and work motivation. 11 Nearly 50% of all respondents indicated they neglected tasks to keep up with KPIs and this number was over 60% for planners.12 Over 70% of all respondents indicated meeting KPIs caused excessive stress13 and this number was over 81% for planners.14 Negative impacts described included sleeping problems, depression, and the use of medication to cope with KPIs.15
In response to workload pressures, CPSU members also delivered a petition to CEO Martin Hoffman with 1,006 respondents requesting a national review of workloads in the Participant Experience Delivery (PED) space in late December 2020.16 The ‘PED’ encompasses the agency’s crucial frontline workforce who engage in planning and reviews for participants. Responses to the petition indicated that workload pressures had not improved since May 2020.
A common theme throughout both the survey and petition responses were feelings of guilt by workers in service delivery because they do not feel as though they are providing the quality support that participants deserve. As one staff member noted in response to our survey:
“I wake up in the night worrying about participants not having what they need or that I may have made a mistake or cut a corner to get things done faster.”
There has been some recognition of the impact of poorly designed KPIs. In early 2020, the Government committed to introducing a number of legislative changes because of the ‘Tune Review into the NDIS’. A key change was the introduction of a ‘Participant Service Guarantee’ (PSG) which aims to “Set clear timeframes for key NDIS processes”.17 To meet this, the NDIA launched a review of their Participant Experience Delivery (PED) KPIs – with the goal of creating new reporting measures for the agency on performance.18 The scope of this review, however, is inadequate as it does not cover the majority of the NDIA workforce, including those outside the planning space, nor considers its effect on work health and safety.
9 Ibid, pg.7. 10 Australian Public Service Employee Census 2020: NDIS Commission highlights, pg.20. 11 Workloads, Stress and KPIs at the NDIA, CPSU Final Report May 2020, page 1. 12 Ibid, pg.3. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid, pg.14. 15 Ibid pg.4. 16 Letter to NDIA dated 24th of December 17 NDIS Participant Service Guarantee, https://www.ndis.gov.au/about-us/policies/service-charter/participant-service-guarantee 18 NDIA KPIs Implementation, CPSU Update July 2020, pg.2
Impacts on staff with a disability The NDIA aims to be an employer of choice for people with disabilities, but the workload requirements, resulting from the KPIs, have a disproportionate impact on staff with a disability. As one employee noted:
“I live with a disability and need more time to achieve my KPIs. I come in early by an hour every day to try and meet my KPIs as I know I am slower with disability and my need to use my AT to access my work. This is never discussed in my workflow.”
Assistive Technology (AT) was commonly cited as a problem for staff with a disability, another worker noting how AT impacts on their ability to meet KPIs:
“Because people are having issues with assistive technology, and everything is taking longer and they’re not able to reach their KPI’s consistently some employees have had their KPI’s adjusted but most haven’t that’s all as a result they are consistently stressing panicking coming into work worried about the next time they had to go to their team leader and explain that their assistive tech isn’t working and worried about the repercussions because they’re expected to perform.”
Internal Review Team
Cutting corners is a common theme when discussing KPI pressures with NDIA staff. Nowhere is this more pronounced than in the Internal Review Team (IRT), which also highlights the impact of outsourcing in the NDIA. In the IRT, a substantial portion of the workforce is made up of labour hire workers.
According to 2020 APS Census results, over 65% of staff in the IRT are burnt out by their work.19 This is unsurprisingly given the IRT has undergone incessant restructures and changes to keep up with workloads. This culminated in the ‘fast flow’ process to address backlogs. A current member of the IRT stated:
“Many LH staff were recruited during the infamous fast-flow process to address an extreme backlog of review requests which required over 12,000 reviews to be completed. Currently that number (of staff) has reduced as many staff left due to the insatiable nature of their employment, and the high demands placed on staff to perform to an unreasonable level.”
Under ‘fast flow’, if a review application met certain criteria, it was not required to undergo the stringent requirements set out under s34 of the NDIS Act. Fast flow has since been abandoned by the agency, which means all reviews must now be assessed under s34 of the NDIS Act and approval given by a staff member with delegated authority. This invariably takes significantly more time for staff to address the backlog in reviews. However, the reverberations of fast flow continue to be felt and as a current IRT staff member noted, KPI pressure often leads to ”…an incentive for staff to ‘cut corners’ or overlook issues in the interests of meeting the Branch and Team targets.”
19 Australian Public Service Employee Census 2020, 12 October – 13 November, Highlights Report Internal Review Team planning.
Previous Committee recommendations
The need for more ongoing APS staff to address workload pressures is not a new issue and has been previously raised with this Committee. It has also been acknowledged in previous reports issued by the Committee.
In the NDIS Planning Final Report 2020, the Committee noted, in relation to an announcement of an increase to the staffing cap, that “…new demands may be placed on NDIA planning staff in the forthcoming roll-out of joint planning, with NDIA delegates required to attend joint planning meetings.” The Committee also stated that “To address this potential shortfall, the committee recommends that the Australian Government ensure that the NDIA is sufficiently resourced to meet future planning needs.”20
The Committee also previously recommended that “…the resourcing for the National Disability Insurance Agency and its Partners in the Community is sufficient to enable planners to collaborate effectively with different service systems throughout the planning process.”21
While the Government lifted its service wide staffing cap in the 2020-21 Federal Budget, it did not increase the NDIA’s ASL, and has not provided NDIA with the capacity employ the number of ongoing APS employees its needs to do the work required.
The agency level ASL cap is the driver of many problems and needs to be removed. This would allow the agency to use its budget allocation to directly employ more staff, and to do more to address the psychosocial hazards being experienced by staff and to provide a better experience for participants and their families.
Issues with the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission Like the NDIA, the NDISQSC has been undermined by a staffing model reliant on labour hire and a failure to provide the resources it needs.
While the NDISQSC has received increases to their ASL in the past, this increase has not reduced the NDISQSC’s reliance on labour hire or addressed workload issues, nor has it dealt with the organisation’s serious workplace cultural issues.
The workload issues are widely known within the agency, the most recent APS Census finding 85% of staff believe they are working above capacity.22 In the reportable incident’s team, staff members at any given time will have hundreds of serious incidents in their case load. After a recent provisional improvement notice, the NDISQSC was forced to openly accept that workloads are a work health and safety issue.
The NDISQC’s primary response has been a consistent uptake of labour hire, but the current resources are simply not enough. Furthermore, rather than hiring more permanent frontline staff, nearly half of the NDISQSC is made up of Executive Level staff – making it one of the most top-heavy organisations in the APS.
The NDISQC has since taken some measures to alleviate caseload pressures, however, thousands of incidents and complaints still need to be actioned. As a result, it is not a far stretch to suggest that the NDISQC is at breaking point.
20 NDIS Planning Final Report 2020, Recommendation 22, 7.76. 21 Ibid, Recommendation 10, 5.107. 22 Australian Public Service Employee Census 2020: NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission highlights, pg.20.
Conclusion
The NDIA and NDISQSC are full of workers who genuinely believe in the scheme and have dedicated their working lives to helping people with disabilities live their best life. As one staff member noted, “The NDIS is the best thing to happen to Australia since Medicare”.
Staff want to work hard and do everything they can to help their agencies meet its objectives to help participants. However, this should not come at a cost to their right to a safe and healthy workplace, or at a cost to the quality of work for the participant, or by risking the sustainability of the entire scheme.
To meet the needs of the community these agencies are supposed to serve and the NDIS workforce, the use of labour hire needs to end. These agencies need to be properly funded and resourced. And with a proportionate increase to permanent staffing that can meet the increasing workloads they are projected to have into the future.
As a result of extensive consultation with CPSU members in the NDIA and NDISQSC, the CPSU proposes the following measures to help address the current issues affecting the NDIS workforce:
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Remove the ASL cap for the NDIA and NDISQSC: i. To employ as many staff as it requires to complete work for participants with a focus on quality over quantity. ii. To provide greater work security for the majority of the workforce by employing staff directly as APS workers. iii. To reduce the KPI pressures currently being experienced by a significant portion of the workforce.
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Increase the scope of the current KPI review: i. To incorporate the views of the majority of the NDIA workforce. ii. To include a wider cross section of the agency outside of the planning space. iii. To approach the review with the aim of reducing KPI related risks to health and safety. iv. To take a systematic approach to mitigating the risk of psychological injury to workers
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Make genuine and reasonable adjustments for people with a disability: i. By making adjustments on KPIs. ii. By providing AT within an appropriate time frame. iii. By consulting with staff who identify with a disability on matters of relevance to them such as recruitment measures.