Analytical Support for Social Welfare Policy and Administration in the UK and New Zealand

John Clark

This paper describes aspects of the analytical services provided by the Department of Social Welfare in New Zealand (DSW), and the Department of Social Security (DSS) in the UK. In 1994 the author, based in the DSS, spent six months in the DSW’s Social Policy Agency, working on the development of modelling tools.

The paper begins with a brief overview of the organisation of the two departments, followed by a discussion of the analytical support currently provided to them. A more specific description of work carried out during the period of secondment in New Zealand is then presented.

The paper concludes that New Zealand inevitably suffers diseconomies of scale in some areas of analytical work, and with more resources would likely benefit from more training for staff and more long-term development work. This is not to advocate the development of large, complex, general-purpose models, which are in danger of becoming an incomprehensible “black box” and which the Analytical Service Division has tended towards over the years.

To command confidence models must be intelligible and their results readily explicable. Hopefully the current comprehensive review of forecasting structures will be of benefit in this respect.