Housing Regulations & Rights

Shelter NSW submission to the Review of the National Regulatory System for Community Housing - April 2019
The Commonwealth and New South Wales (NSW) Governments have jointly announced a comprehensive review of the National Regulatory System for Community Housing. The aim of the review is to:

• ensure the regulatory framework will continue to support the growth of the community housing sector into the future;
• secure a national system; and
• improve data and governance arrangements.

Our submission explores some of the higher-level principles we expect the working group will encounter throughout the current discussion and review, in particular;

• that a growing community housing sector should operate not only with transparency and accountability to government funders and private financiers in mind, but also with residents and other key stakeholders across the broader community whose primary interests in affordable housing are generally of a different kind; and
• that a regulatory system should seek to enhance, rather than potentially diminish, the sector’s capacity for growth – in terms of both practice improvements towards putting consumer outcomes at the centre of community housing business, and portfolio development and/or asset management as providers of an increasingly diverse supply of social and affordable housing.

Shelter NSW Submission to Australian Building Codes Board (ABCB) Accessible Housing Options Paper - 4 December 2018
The Accessible Housing Options Paper ('Options Paper') has been developed by the ABCB to provide preliminary options and costings on the possible inclusion of a minimum accessibility standard for housing in the National Construction Code.

Shelter NSW Submission - Senate Inquiry into the Social Services Legislation Amendment (Housing Affordability) Bill - 14 November 2017
Shelter's submission on the Bill that seek to introduce an Automatic Reduction Deduction Scheme (ARDS) argues that such a scheme will cause significant hardship to many vulnerable households within our community. We also believe that there is no evidence to support a punitive approach and that there are alternative approaches available to manage and reduce rental arrears which can deliver better outcomes for tenants.