Mike Williams: Driver licence programme gets tick from Impact Lab

invitation to meet Sir Bill English leads to praise for Howard League programme. Photo /File

Late last year I was surprised to receive an invitation to meet Sir Bill English, the former National Party Prime Minister, at an Auckland Hotel.

Tony Gibbs, the recently retired president of The New Zealand Howard League for Penal Reform, has known Sir Bill for many years and had acquainted him with the programmes operated by the Howard League.

English had also been guest speaker at two Howard League Literacy Programme graduations at Rimutaka and Paremoremo jails.

What happened at that meeting was a lesson in how to make good use of a very good brain after an illustrious political career spanning nearly 28 years.

Among other pursuits, English has founded, with partners, a company called Impact Lab which is a commercialised expression of the idea of "social investment", a concept English pioneered during his stint as finance minister and then prime minister.

The core idea is best summarised on Impact Lab's website and says: "At Impact Lab, we bring together big data, powerful analytics, and the best scientific evidence to understand the social impact of dedicated people doing good work."

English suggested that his new company be engaged to evaluate the Howard League's driving offenders programme to get an idea of its potential value to New Zealand and to see if it was a good social investment.

Although there are those who oppose the whole idea of "social investment", Tony Gibbs and I were keen to have our programme independently assessed and agreed to make all our data available.

At the time we spoke to Sir Bill the programme had generated nearly 3000 licences for offenders, mostly those just out of jail and/or on a track that was headed in that direction.

We also had commissioned research into the programme using an Australian company that specialises in social research and we had discovered through qualitative (focus groups) and quantitative (phone calls) that nearly 60 per cent of our drivers' licence clients identified as Māori and over half of these people had found employment after getting their licences.

This was encouraging as New Zealand's bloated and increasingly expensive jail population is over half Māori.

This research was made available to the Impact Lab analysts.

Mike Williams

Impact Lab's approach is best summarised on its website: "Impact Lab uses the best of data about people's lives to understand what works, for whom, at what cost. We combine publicly available insights from the NZ Treasury, NZ Statistics and other sources. Impact values produced using Statistics NZ's Integrated Data Infrastructure are a particularly valuable resource.

"The IDI is a dataset containing information on every Zealander about many areas of their lives – education, health, social welfare, employment and others. It is anonymised, so we can't identify anyone. This adds up to over 166 new billion facts, for nine million New Zealanders (some have left the country, and some have passed on), for more than a generation of us."

We know that a good part of our incarceration problem is a sky-high rate of reoffending which is heavily reduced when a released prisoner finds a job.

Any strategy that reduces reoffending and our prison population should be welcomed by us all given that every one of the now 10,000 plus prisoners cost the taxpayer close to $120,000 each per annum.

Impact Lab's analysis considered the factors of increased employment, improved health outcomes and reduced offending as a result of the programme.

On this basis, the social return on investment was calculated at $1: $3.26.

In other words, every dollar invested in the Driver License Programme results in $3.26 returned to New Zealand.

An additional outcome of improved road safety was noted.

The Howard League people are naturally delighted at this result and we believe that we have developed at a strategy that will help released prisoners find work, reduce the rate of reoffending and ultimately positively impact on New Zealand's rate of incarceration..

It is perhaps somewhat ironic that a former National Party leader's project has validated a coalition Government initiative and I have sent the Impact Lab results to New Zealand First Minister Shane Jones.

Shane is responsible for the Provincial Growth Fund which funds 16 of the programmes. These are limited to regional New Zealand (which does not include the big urban areas of Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch).

Given the now established value of the programme, we will be offering to extend it to the big cities after the lockdown is lifted.

We will also be talking to politicians across the board about developing strategies to get prisoners their learner licences while serving their sentences.

This programme began in Hawke's Bay six years ago and was developed though the diligence, determination and personal warmth of one key person.

We can now prove just how successful it has been. Thank you, Anne.

Mike Williams grew up in Hawke's Bay. He is CEO of the NZ Howard League and a former Labour Party president. All opinions are his and not those of Hawke's Bay Today.