Response from the Treasury

18 September 2024

Office of the Auditor-General Te Mana Arotake
Level 2. 100 Molesworth Street,
Thorndon
Wellington 6011

Attention: Edward Tanoi

Follow up – Performance audit: How well public organisations are supporting Whānau Ora and whānau-centred approaches

Tēnā koe Edward

Thanks for your follow up letter dated 2 September 2024.

We are responding to your recommendation:

• the Treasury and Te Kawa Mataaho Public Service Commission provide more proactive guidance to public organisations about joint working and funding arrangements available that would support the use of whānau-centred approaches.

The Treasury often provides direct support to agencies working through matters of system design, including proposals for joint working arrangements and we continue to do this. As an example; the Treasury have been working with the Social Sector Commissioning (SSC) team at MSD for advice on their guidance relating to SSC and we have been providing feedback from a Treasury perspective. As MSD is the lead agency on SSC, we have supported their SSC work programme that was linked to the previous Government’s SSC action plan: Social Sector Commissioning 2022-2028 Action Plan (beehive.govt.nz).

Further through our role in the Budget process, our vote teams draw on our collective experience when considering budget bids including any bids related to Whānau Ora. This assessment process inevitably requires us to consider funding arrangements that support the use of whānau-centred approaches.

In our initial response letter dated 4 August 2022, we noted:

• Like all agencies we need to prioritise our resources and any work on cross agency funding will be prioritised against other stewardship work. At this stage we cannot made any commitments on when we might focus on communication about cross-agency funding as part of this overall work area.

This remains the case for the Treasury.

Ngā mihi,

Jayne Winfield
Chief Government Accountant