The Cost of Exclusion

IHC’s report, The Cost of Exclusion: Hardship and People with Intellectual Disability in New Zealand lays bare the depth of poverty experienced by people with intellectual disabilities.

The report shows people with an intellectual disability are twice as likely to live in hardship or severe hardship.

They face significantly higher rates of hardship at every stage of life. Severe hardship rates triple in middle age, even as they decline for the rest of the population.

Living with disability comes at a real cost, one that’s falling on individuals and families who are often excluded from work, transport and even food.

The report was completed for IHC by Kōtātā researchers Keith McLeod and Luisa Beltran-Castillon, and Geoff Stone from Ripple Research. They interviewed people with an intellectual disability and their families, and extracted data about the outcomes of people with intellectual disability from the Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI).

The IDI is one of the more comprehensive linked datasets in the world and holds de-identified data on nine million individuals in New Zealand, dating back to 1840, collected from government agencies, surveys, and non-governmental organisations over many years.

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