The last disability plan’s final report card exists. It is not on the page built for it

The Disability Inclusion Act 2014 does not only require a council to write a plan. It requires the council to report on implementing it, and the council’s own statutory index cites section 13(1) for that duty. Central Coast Council has done it. That is the first thing to say, and it matters, because the easy version of this story would be that nobody reported anything.

They did. The 2024-25 annual report carries an entry headed Implementation of the Disability Inclusion Action Plan, indexed as item xvii at page 109. Underneath it is a table with three columns, action description, indicators and progress comment, running through the plan’s actions one at a time. We counted 39 distinct action codes reported there, across the plan’s focus areas. The first is the campaign action, against which the council records launching the Hidden Disabilities Sunflower.

2024-25 was the final year of the 2021-2025 plan, and the annual report says so. So this is the closing account of a four-year commitment: the nearest thing to a report card that exists.

Now try to find it as a resident

The council has a page called Accessibility and inclusion. It is the right page. It carries the new plan, the Easy English version, and a line that reads: View our previous Disability Inclusion Action Plan (DIAP) progress reports on the links below.

Those links are:

• the DIAP, 2021-2025: Progress Report (December 2023), which is a highlights document published roughly midway through the plan;
• the DIAP, 2017-2021: Year 1 Progress Report, a report on the previous plan; and
• the DIAP, 2017-2021: Year 2 Progress Report, which is not a standalone report at all. Follow it and you get the Part 5 Statutory Reporting extract from the Annual Report 2018-19.

That last link is the interesting one, because it shows the council already knows the annual report’s statutory section is where DIAP progress lives, and has published it here before as a progress report. The pattern exists. It just has not been continued for the plan that has actually finished.

So a resident who wants to know whether the last plan delivered is offered a document from the middle of it and a document about the plan before it. The final-year account, which is the one that answers the question, is not on the page. You would need to know that council disability reporting lives in annual reports, find the 2024-25 one, download 30 megabytes, and know to look for a roman numeral in the statutory section.

Why this is worth a story rather than a shrug

Every organisation buries things in annual reports. What makes this one worth naming is the subject. A Disability Inclusion Action Plan is, in large part, a document about making information and services findable by people who are currently not being reached. The council’s new plan weights its largest single group of actions towards its own systems and processes for exactly that reason.

Against that, publishing the plan’s own final report card only inside a 300-page PDF, while the page designed for this audience points at 2023, is a small failure of the thing the plan is about. It is also, unusually for the problems we write about here, trivially fixable: it is one link on one page, pointing at a document the council has already written and already published.

We are not suggesting anything was hidden. The statutory duty was met, the document is public, and we found it in an afternoon from the council’s own website. The gap is between compliance and communication, and those are different jobs.

What we have not established

We have not assessed how well the 39 reported actions were delivered, only that they are reported. Reading the progress comments against the original 2021-2025 plan action by action is a longer job and a fair one, and it needs the original plan document, which is not linked from the accessibility page either. We have also not asked the council whether a consolidated final report on the plan exists somewhere we did not look. If it does, we will say so here.

The open question from our earlier piece stands, slightly sharpened. The new plan runs to 2030 and commits to reporting. The test of that commitment will not be whether a table appears in a future annual report. It will be whether anyone can find it.