A shortage of disability service providers in the ACT is limiting the choices of participants in the National Disability Insurance Scheme, a review of the national rollout has found.
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Twelve randomly-selected people on a "citizens' jury" heard from 15 NDIS participants, including three from the ACT, last February in a process led by People with Disability Australia and funded by the NDIS.
The jury's scorecard recommends the National Disability Insurance Agency urgently steps up its efforts to work with all levels of government to ensure there was enough time and resources to create a free market of providers to takeover defunct government disability services.
The ACT was singled out as an area of concern in the scorecard, which said the government immediately withdrew some of its disability services when the NDIS was launched last July.
"This has caused a gap in service offerings as a free market has not had time, nor been supported to develop, resulting in participants having little or no access to services," the report said.
The ACT government copped criticism from parents of children accessing early intervention services when it ceased its programs last December to make way for six private providers who won NDIA tenders.
By June 2017 the territory government will completely withdraw all disability services including supported accommodation and therapy.
The ACT's NDIS expert panel consumer co-chair, Sue Salthouse, said all Australian jurisdictions were "guilty" of redirecting some funds too soon, but the ACT wasn't particularly remiss.
"It's a problem Australia-wide that governments don't commit funding to the NDIS to such an extent that they're unable to maintain funding for essential services for all the people who won't get an intensive package," she said.
"We need to remember that it's only 10 per cent of the population of people with some form of disability who are getting the intensive support packages.
"People with mild to moderate disabilities need light-touch and maybe infrequent support, but they certainly need to be able to maximise their social and economic participation."
Giving people with disabilities choice and control, by taking money from providers and putting it in the hands of individuals, were key aims of the NDIS, and the report found they were being compromised in the ACT.
"Participants should have the option to change providers, which is difficult if there are few or no providers in their area or the nearest provider is in a different region or state," the scorecard said.
Ms Salthouse said the lack of choice was an issue in more remote regions, but in the ACT there was already a range of "very competent and high quality" providers and the market was developing.
Many of the NDIS "issues" the scorecard identified had been raised previously by ACT participants, including concerns over the "lack of consistency" and "high variability" in the attitudes and skills of NDIA staff, confusion over the assessment process, and the perception that staff were struggling under "heavy caseloads".
But Ms Salthouse said the "moderation" between plans was a positive and she was confident the NDIA would be able to build consistency and show how it reached its decisions.
"It's counter-productive for people to look at the packages and see differences and not understand how individualistic this is," she said.
"Even someone else who has a spinal cord injury the same as mine, who may be the same age, in the same city ... they're going to get a very different packages because all the things around us in our lives are very different."
The report said ACT participants were "consistently having positive experiences".
NDIA planners in the ACT were found to respond quickly when participants asked for their plans to be changed, but the report acknowledged some dissatisfaction and questioned the accuracy of the NDIA's participant surveys recommending an independent expert oversee future evaluation.
"The ACT trial was working well for the witnesses but we acknowledge it is early days," the report said.
"This needs to be balanced with participant satisfaction surveys of other ACT participants, as the jury heard that there were other participants in the ACT community that had not had a good experience."
Ms Salthouse the NDIA had given a "huge philosophical commitment" to formally respond to the scorecard and its recommendations.
"We've got lots of positive stories [in the ACT] … and where they're not positive we've got flexibility to look at why," she said.
