The cut to Total Mobility doesn’t add up

I have spent the better part of this year asking the Government to explain itself on Total Mobility. In December last year, 1,891 of you signed a petition asking the House to increase funding so the scheme meets the needs of everyone who uses it and everyone who delivers it.

I started that petition because I believe that the scheme was underfunded and the demand for it wasn’t being properly met. Seven days after that petition was presented to Parliament, the Government announced it was cutting the subsidy instead.

I have now obtained, under the Official Information Act 1982, the briefings, models and advice behind that decision. Ten documents were released to me by the Ministry of Transport. They deserve a careful read, because they do not say what the public messaging says. In several important places, they say close to the opposite. Here is what I found.

First: demand surged because the scheme finally became affordable. The documents are unambiguous about why Total Mobility costs more than it used to. When the subsidy rose from 50 percent to 75 percent in April 2022, it effectively halved what users pay, and people who had been rationing trips started taking them.

The numbers tell the story plainly. Trips rose from 1.8 million in 2018/19 to 2.6 million in 2023/24 — growth of roughly 8.3 percent a year, against just 2.3 percent a year in the period before. Registered users reached 107,000, up 40 percent over five years. In the single year after the subsidy increase, trips jumped 37 percent.

This is not a scheme spiralling out of control. This is a scheme that started doing its job. Disabled people travelled more because, for the first time in years, they could afford to. That is the actual demand the
Government now wants to reduce. –

Second: a large part of the cost rise is price, not people. It is tempting to read rising costs as rising usage. The documents show that is only half the picture. The average price of a trip rose from around $20 in 2021/22 to around $30 in 2024/25 — a 50 percent increase in three years, or about 15 percent a year, well above inflation.

Crucially, the average fare paid by users barely moved. Almost the entire increase flowed through as a higher subsidy paid per trip. In other words, a significant share of the “blowout” is the cost of taxis
going up, not disabled people behaving unreasonably. Cutting the subsidy does nothing about the underlying price of a trip. It simply transfers that rising cost back onto the people least able to carry it.

Third: the headline $236 million is doing a lot of work.The figure used to justify the cut is a projected shortfall of $236 million. The documents make clear what that number actually is: a projection
across all funders — the National Land Transport Fund, local share and the Crown — over five years. The single-year shortfall from the Fund and local share for 2024/25 is around $10 million.

There is a further detail the public has not been told. The briefing for the Minister’s meeting with myself and Blake Forbes records that Budget 2025 increased Total Mobility funding from $12 million to $24 million per annum. That increase was achieved by reallocating money from public transport
concessions for Community Services Card holders — not by adding new money. One group of low-income New Zealanders was used to pay for another.

The briefing notes this increase “was not widely publicised”. It is not hard to see why. In Budget 2024/25 this government took $12m from CSC cardholder funding and gave it to Total Mobility. That is a classic example of Robin Hood funding.

Fourth: the agency did not assess what the cut would do to us This is the finding that should trouble anyone who believes decisions affecting disabled people ought to be evidence-based. The NZTA analysis states, in its own words, that no analysis has been conducted to determine the benefit-cost ratio of the current scheme, the impact on users, or whether the benefits outweigh the increasing costs. “no analysis has been conducted to determine the benefit-cost ratio of the current scheme, the impact on users, or whether the benefits outweigh the increasing costs”.

Read that again. The lever the Government has pulled — reducing the subsidy from 75 percent to 65 percent — was chosen without any assessment of the harm it would cause to the people who rely on it.
I have made the point previously that there is no user-impact analysis. But the fact that there was no benefit-cost ratio is new and really shocking, and the fact that any program lacks a BCR and will do harm to the community its meant to serve gets funded is an indictment on this government.
There is a funding problem, a set of levers to reduce a number on a spreadsheet, and a decision to pull the one that moves the number fastest.

Fifth: they considered a fairer option and rejected it.
The analysis looked at trip caps as an alternative to a subsidy cut. It found that 20 percent of clients account for around 75 percent of the subsidy, and that these are very likely the people with the highest needs. The report acknowledges that any trip cap would disproportionately affect this group, and that even the strictest scenario modelled — a cap of 20 trips a month — would reduce national subsidy costs by only about 7 percent.

So trip caps were set aside, partly because they would punish the highest-need users, and that is the right thing to do. But the subsidy cut the Government chose instead does not protect those users — it spreads the cost onto every user, including them. The bluntest instrument was selected after a more targeted one was rejected on fairness grounds. The fairness concern did not survive contact with the easier option.

Sixth: the modelling rests on data the agency itself does not trust Throughout the analysis, NZTA describes its own data in striking terms. It refers to “quality issues”, to “errors and inconsistencies”, and instructs the reader to treat published figures as “indicative rather than definitive”. Two regions, Gisborne and the West Coast, are excluded from the tables entirely because the data does not exist.
The savings projections also depend on an assumption about elasticity — how much people stop travelling when prices rise.

NZTA estimates this somewhere between 0.5 and 1.0 and concedes the figure is confounded by COVID, by the simultaneous introduction of half-price public transport fares, and by messy historical data.
Every summary table nonetheless assumes 0.7, and the report admits that if the true figure is lower, then the projected savings are overstated.

Sit with the logic of that for a moment. The policy is justified, in part, by how effectively it will stop disabled people taking trips. The “saving” is the journeys that no longer happen. I have explained in
other pieces that this argument of savings is a myth as these savings are shifted to Health and Welfare budgets. A scheme that exists to enable mobility is being trimmed by a model that counts decreased mobility as a success — and the model runs on data its own authors will not vouch for. But when the underlying data is admitted by the Ministry itself to be unreliable, the confidence projected in public is hard to justify.

Where this leaves us
The Government’s own documents tell a different story from its press releases. Demand rose because the scheme became affordable. A large share of the cost increase is rising taxi prices, not unreasonable use.
The headline shortfall is a five-year, all-funder figure stretched to do maximum work. A targeted option was rejected as unfair, and then a less targeted one was adopted instead. And the central decision was made with no assessment of its impact on the very people it affects.

I do not accept that this is the balance the Government claims to have struck. You cannot balance the interests of disabled people against the books when you have not measured the cost to disabled people at all.

The subsidy is due to fall from 75 percent to 65 percent, with fare caps cut by around 10 percent, from 1 July 2026. The fight is not over, and these documents strengthen our hand. I will keep publishing what I find, and I will keep pressing for a decision made on evidence rather than on the easiest number to move.

If Total Mobility matters to you or to someone you support, stay with this. The case for the scheme has never been stronger — and now we have the Government’s own files to prove it.

Nick Ruane writes Disability Politics at nicholasruane@substack.com