The National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) Quality and Safeguards Commissioner, is being granted additional banning powers to prevent people who may pose a risk of harm to participants from entering or re-entering the NDIS.

Under the amendment, workers who have left the NDIS, including where they have been fired due to unsuitable behaviour, can be banned from re-entering the field.

Minister for the National Disability Insurance Scheme, Stuart Robert, said: “The amendments also mean the NDIS Commissioner can use information from sources outside the NDIS, such as a person’s conduct in aged care or child care work, to ban an unsuitable person from entering the NDIS in the first place.”

The quality and safeguarding commissioner is responsible for regulating NDIS providers and enforcing the NDIS Code of Conduct. The banning orders are at the extreme end of the commissioner’s regulatory powers and are only used in the most serious of cases.

Details of providers and workers who have been banned publicly available in the NDIS Provider Register so that people with disability, their supporters and providers can use the register to check that the people they are engaging to deliver NDIS services have not had a banning order against them.

According to the recently published NDIS Participant Outcomes Report, almost 90 per cent of participants aged 25 and over said they now had someone outside their home to call for practical help, so it is fundamental that they meet certain standards of care and safety.

NDIS: New banning powers strengthen protections for NDIS participants

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