13 Oct 2015
IPART concluded its review of the fees charged by the NSW Trustee & Guardian (NSWTG) on 30 November 2014.
On 13 October 2015, the Attorney General announced that NSWTG will adopt the majority of IPART’s final recommendations. Our Final Report:
- Recommends a more cost-reflective, transparent, consistent and fair fee structure.
- Recommends fees are set to recover our estimate of NSWTG’s efficient (not actual) costs, so that vulnerable and disadvantaged clients are only paying fees to fund NSWTG’s efficient costs.
- Sets subsidy payments (Community Service Obligations or CSOs) for clients who cannot afford to pay the full efficient fees.
- Recommends that NSWTG should restructure its operations and change the way it delivers its services to control its costs, improve its quality of services, become financially sustainable and deliver better value for its clients.
- Recommends fees for only for some of NSWTG’s services. We do not recommend fees for services where clients can choose whether or not to use NSWTG or another service provider such as a lawyer.
- Recommends fees that will impact on different clients differently but will result in clients paying, on average, 4% less than current fees for regulated services and significantly less than the fees proposed by NSWTG.
- Recommends explicit CSO funding is applied to reduce fees for financially vulnerable clients, which is expected to result in average fees paid by clients to go down 12% under our recommendations.