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What choice for tenants in Australia’s public housing transfers?

Posted by on August 10th, 2015 · Uncategorized

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By Hal Pawson and Ilan Wiesel

Recent years have seen federal and state governments taking a growing interest in transferring public housing to community housing providers (CHPs). CHP tenants may receive rent assistance (RA), whereas public housing tenants cannot. For this reason alone, such transfers can inject significant additional funds, captured indirectly through rent, into a starved social housing system. Some states have also justified transfers with the claim that these will result in better and ‘more responsive’ housing services.

2012 marked something of a turning point. Until then, the 20,000 public housing properties (or tenancies) transferred to CHPs had mostly been handed over via small and experimental transactions. By comparison, transfers announced and in some cases completed over the past two years, such as in South Australia and Tasmania, have been markedly different. These transfers are larger in scale, more competitive on recipient CHP selection, and more financially risky for CHP contenders – both successful and unsuccessful bidders.

Not surprisingly, given that transfers usually involve occupied homes, some tenants and their advocates have voiced alarm about the impact of the transition from a government to a non-government landlord. As noted in our 2013 AHURI report, one specific concern has been that such a change in status exposes tenants to the ‘no cause eviction’ power available to CHPs, but not public housing landlords. A broader anxiety relates to the ‘undemocratic’ nature of CHPs, as organisations run by unelected boards and, as some campaigners would argue, therefore less accountable and responsive to tenants. In any event, a key policy debate is the extent to which tenants should have a ‘voice’ and a ‘choice’ in designing, and consenting to, transfer programs directly affecting their tenancy status.

Despite legislative obligations such as the NSW Housing Act 2001, and policy commitments such those voiced in the 2008 social housing reform agenda, Australian public housing authorities have a weak record of facilitating tenant participation in housing management. This weakness is reflected in the limited extent of ‘tenant voice’ designed into Australia’s public housing transfers. In most transfer programs covered by our research on pre-2012 transactions, ‘tenant consultation’ processes consisted mostly of one-sided dissemination of information about government plans.

Despite being largely excluded from the design of transfer programs, tenants have occasionally expressed their voice independently through oppositional campaigns. One such instance was credited with sinking a large-scale handover contemplated by the Victoria State Government in the early 2000s. The Save Public Housing Campaign continues to argue that transfers should be resisted because CHPs are ‘private landlords’ unconstrained by the ‘protections’ for tenants inherent in public housing.

Nevertheless, while transfers agendas have been typically developed with little if any consumer input, in most programs tenants have enjoyed individual choice on whether to switch their tenancy to an incoming CHP. The dominant view has been that tenants must voluntarily sign-up to their new CHP landlord, such that they become RA-eligible. Sometimes this ‘choice’ has been influenced by sticks as well as carrots. In New South Wales for example, tenants in estates subject to transfer were informed that declining to switch brought with it a risk of compulsory relocation. In practice, forced moves of tenants resisting transfer have rarely, if ever, been enacted. Nevertheless, some residents felt their consent to transfer had been obtained under duress.

The ‘individual choice’ framework, as described above, was problematic in other respects too. From the recipient landlord viewpoint, it spelled uncertainty about the number of properties to be transferred and factored into their business plan. The possibility that ‘incomplete’ transfers could leave multi-unit blocks in mixed management was considered inefficient by landlords and objectionable by tenants. For these reasons there is a policymaker consensus that the ‘individual choice’ model is untenable for the larger public housing transfers envisaged for the future.

One potential solution would be to adopt a version of the United Kingdom’s ‘collective choice’ system. In the UK, a council-proposed transfer can proceed only with tenant majority endorsement in a formal ballot. Without such approval, no transfer would take place. With approval, all eligible tenants – including ‘no’ voters – are bound by the outcome. From a government perspective, this approach can be useful in legitimising a potentially controversial proposal. However, it also entails the risk of defeat and the ‘politicising’ of a process that so far in Australia has been conveniently portrayed in purely managerialist terms. The feasibility of adapting the UK collective choice approach to fit the markedly different Australian constitutional context is questionable.

For this reason it is perhaps unsurprising that ‘mandated transfers’, whereby a change of landlord can be enforced regardless of tenants’ individual or collective consent, has emerged as a preferable option for governments and CHPs. In fact, in 2013 the Queensland Government introduced new legislation to enable such mandated transfers.

Historically, tenants have had very little voice in shaping transfer plans, with their choices restricted to two predetermined options with a heavily loaded dice. Linked with the growing imposition of fixed term tenancies in public housing, this reflects a broader process of marginalisation of social renters as ‘temporary occupants’ with little legitimate say on managerial decision-making. This is hardly consistent with official rhetoric about enhancing the social inclusion of marginalised groups! Rather, new models of more meaningful individual and collective choice and voice should be developed to empower social renters, and to improve policy and services through consideration of the views and experiences of tenants as key stakeholders.

 

This post was first published in the Australasian Housing Institute journal ‘HousingWORKS’

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