The reviewers of the $42 billion National Disability Insurance Scheme are expected to urge Bill Shorten to implement more rigorous and tailored assessments of participants’ needs to cut spending growth and to improve the “complicated, bureaucratic and unfair” program.

But Bruce Bonyhady and Lisa Paul stress that any shake-up to how participants’ overall budgets are determined should not be construed as a return to the ill-fated “independent assessments” canned by the former government.