Between October 2018 and September 2019, the NSW government transferred the management of over 14,000 public housing rental agreements throughout NSW to 10 Community Housing Providers (CHPs).
In March this year, the Tenants’ Union of NSW (TU) published a report, Change Management: Social Housing Management Transfers Best Practice Report on the tenants’ experience of this move.
The TU commissioned the report because it was concerned that the management of over 14,000 public housing tenancies was moving from a single landlord – the state government – to multiple not-for-profit landlords, each with their own different processes and policies which might impact negatively on public housing tenants.
While over 95 per cent of tenants transferred reported a positive experience, it is the 5 per cent who did not that is of concern to the TU, because that 5 per cent represented people who were the most vulnerable or had the most complex needs, the people that we would assume would require the most amount of help during a transition of this nature.
Its concerns resided in the fact that public housing tenants had not been able to make an informed decision as to whether they wanted to transfer to a different landlord or even which landlord they might transfer to.
In order to carry out the transfer the state government had amended the NSW Housing Act so that the ability of the tenant to make a choice or have a voice in the transfer process was removed.
In consequence, the report said, many tenants were disengaged from the process and did not have a clear understanding of what was happening. The lack of choice also meant that in some cases new service providers disregarded standards of respectful customer service.
The report recommends that in future transfers tenants are given the opportunity either individually, or in groups, to decide whether or not their tenancy is transferred and to whom.
In its response to the draft report, the Department of Community and Justice (DCJ) acknowledged that while it had “enabled” legislation that allowed the transfer of the management of tenants without their consent, this was done after a large number of tenant forums and individual visits “to ensure that tenants were informed and were assisted during the transfer process”. It added: “It should be noted that large-scale reforms such as the SHMT (Social Housing Management Transfer) program could not have been achieved effectively or efficiently without mandatory tenant transfer legislation.”
According to the TU report, the government’s stated reason for the transfer is that CHPs will provide more diversity, and the competition between landlords would ensure better services for tenants. However, the TU’s report argues that where landlords did not have to provide information about their services to the tenants but rather to the state government, and where CHPs have been provided 20-year contracts to manage the tenancies, competition to provide better services is not going to happen.
In its response to the draft report, the DCJ pointed out that although each CHP “has its own policy regarding rent, eligibility and access, they are contractually obliged to base these policies on the requirements of the DCJ community housing policies”.
The DCJ goes on to say that CHPs are independent and distinct from government and it is important that they stay that way because their business model is not viable without “the tax exemptions and other benefits that flow from charitable status”. The whole point of the transfer was to encourage alternative delivery mechanisms and diversity and therefore “forcing the standard public delivery model through absolute policy consistency negates one of the basic tenets of the program”.
The author of the report, Professor Michael Darcy, argues that it is not that community housing is not as good as public housing but rather that the different providers have different approaches and it’s “a bit of a lottery” as to which you get as your provider.
One issue that came to light when large numbers of people were transferred on a single date is that not everyone managed to fill out forms transferring their rent and/or their Commonwealth Rental Assistance (CRA) to their new providers or the CentrePay forms that allowed the money to be transferred via Centrelink by the due date. Some service providers found other ways of dealing with this issue, including allowing longer times to process forms and data and making a determined effort to find out what was behind this mix-up. In other cases, people were evicted from their homes.
Professor Darcy emphasised that this was a small number of people, but they were also the “people who were most likely to get confused and not get the forms done right”. They were also the people “with quite complex family lives and so on, they’re the people who are going to be most vulnerable to those sorts of things and I have interviewed people as part of that research, who basically, you know, were now sleeping on their friends’ couch”.
When asked what happened to those people Professor Darcy said that, if people have been evicted for being in arrears, until they pay those arrears they will not be able to access social housing.
Public housing tenants pay 25 per cent of their income to their landlord. When people were transferred to a CHP this 25 per cent, and the added CRA, is given to the new landlord.
If you are living in a capital city, are on a full pension, in a high-rent area, and have been means-tested, the CRA benefit is around $67 weekly (according to Professor Darcy). This money does not come into your bank account, it goes directly to the CHP via your Centrelink account.
If for some reason there has been a mix-up, a person on a pension is not going to be able to find an extra $67 or be able to pay the back-dated rent.
The report mentions a mother of four who had continued to pay her original rent and had not received any information that she was in arrears. She had changed her email address while with the Department of Community and Family Services. However, she only found out that she was in arrears at the first inspection, three months after her transfer to a CHP. At this point, she signed forms for CRA and CentrePay and yet, at a future date, she was taken to court for being in arrears. At the time that she was interviewed she was homeless.
The DCJ has acknowledged that when carrying out “future transfers, early and more comprehensive planning around a small cohort of highly complex tenancies is required to avoid issues at go-live and post-transfer. This has been noted by CHPs as well”.
The SSH was unable to get a response from the Community Housing Industry Association or a Community Housing Provider for this article.
