Why 'authorise' additional occupants?

As every public housing tenant knows – or should know by now, after the recent amnesty – a tenant must disclose any additional occupants to Housing NSW. There's a few reasons for this, the main one being that Housing NSW needs to know who is in the household and what their income is in order to work out the appropriate rent rebate. That's fair enough.

But it's not the whole story. Once a public housing tenant has disclosed an additional occupant, Housing NSW says it will decide whether to 'authorise' or 'approve' the additional occupant – or, alternatively, refuse to authorise them.

We think this part of the process is not 'fair enough': it's presumptuous, paternalistic and, in all likelihood, counterproductive.

Here's what Housing NSW's policy says about the process for 'authorising' or 'approving' additional occupants. From the 'During a Tenancy' Policy:

Additional occupants

...
Housing NSW will assess all applications for additional occupants. If Housing NSW approves an application for an additional occupant, the new person will become an approved member of the tenant’s household.... For more information on the assessment criteria for approving applications for additional occupants, go to Approving additional occupants.

That link takes us into the Tenancy Policy Supplement, where we find:

9. Approving additional occupants

In most cases, Housing NSW will approve applications for additional occupants if:

• It does not cause severe overcrowding, and
• The additional occupant does not have a poor record of tenancy with Housing NSW, and
• Housing NSW is reasonably satisfied that nuisance will not occur by allowing the person as an additional occupant, and
• The household composition is suitable for the type of property. For example, if an additional occupant wishes to take up residency in a Senior Communities property, Housing NSW will only approve the application if the composition remains consistent with the objectives of Senior Communities, and
• If the additional occupant owes any money to Housing NSW from a previous tenancy, the occupant has made arrangements to repay the debt, and
• If the additional occupant has a current tenancy with Housing NSW, this tenancy must be finalised, and
• The additional occupant is not an unsatisfactory or ineligible former tenant.

Housing NSW may defer approval for an additional occupant if the tenant’s rent account is in arrears.

So there's the list of circumstances in Housing NSW might refuse to approve of a disclosed additional occupant. These are all circumstances that Housing NSW would rightly like to know about – and it will be less likely to find out them, because of the 'approval' question.

Think it through: if a tenant is concerned that Housing NSW will disapprove of their additional occupant because Housing might think that place is getting overcrowded, or they've got a poor record with Housing NSW, or any of those other reasons, the tenant may opt to not disclose the additional occupant at all. If there was no prospect of a high-handed disapproval of their choice of household member (and no vague threats Housing NSW makes about taking action against the tenant if they naughtily persist in keeping a unauthorised disclosed occupant – more on that in a moment), a tenant will be more likely to disclose, and Housing NSW will be more likely to find out about those circumstances it's interested in. 

Now, Housing NSW doesn't want just to know about these circumstances; rightly, it will want to be able to do something about them too. For each of these circumstances, there is a better way of dealing with the situation than disapproving of the additional occupant.

If there's overcrowding: Housing NSW can warn the tenant about the term of their agreement regarding the maximum number of residents (assuming its a reasonable maximum, of course), and take action for breach of the maximum number term, if things get really bad. If the additional occupant has a poor record with Housing NSW, or they're a young person in a seniors' block, or Housing NSW is concerned about possibility of nuisance, it can warn the tenant about the nuisance term of their agreement and vicarious liability, keep a closer eye on things, and take action for breach of that term, if need be. If the additional occupant owes Housing NSW money, Housing NSW can ask them to pay up.

So what does disapproving of the additional occupant achieve? Housing NSW will ask the tenant to get rid of the additional occupant. And what if they don't? Housing NSW's policy is confused and vague on this point. Going back to the 'During a Tenancy' Policy:

If a tenant does not apply for permission for the additional occupant to stay, Housing NSW will consider that person to be an unauthorised occupant. If a tenant has unauthorised additional occupants living in their property, they will be breaching the terms of their tenancy agreement and Housing NSW may take action under the Residential Tenancies Act 2010 or the Rent Subsidy Non-Disclosure Policy. 

The policy confuses 'non-disclosed' additional occupants with 'unauthorised' additional occupants. As we said at the outset, we accept that tenants must disclose and Housing NSW needs to be able to act on non-disclosure – but we're talking here about where the tenant has disclosed and Housing NSW has refused to authorise. The policy is not clear on this.

Strictly speaking, the 'Rent Subsidy Non-Disclosure Policy' is not relevant; and the provisions of the Housing Act for rent rebate cancellations and prosecutions for fraud are not enlivened where the tenant has disclosed everything as required. Looking at a recent Housing NSW tenancy agreement, there's no term requiring the tenant to boot out any occupant who does not meet the approval of the landlord – and if there was, it would arguably be invalid and void for inconsistency with the tenant's right to quiet enjoyment and reasonable peace, comfort and privacy.

In fact, the consequences of having an unauthorised disclosed additional occupant are all a bit uncertain – which indicates that matters don't often get pressed to this point. And this indicates that the question of 'authorisation' is not doing much work for Housing NSW. But it is likely to be putting tenants off disclosing in the first place.

If Housing NSW wants to maximise disclosure – and it should – it should consider ditching its hang-up about 'authorisation'.

Down and out in Queensland

Last time we mentioned Queensland, it was good news: after the State Government cut the funding of the Queensland Tenants Advice and Advocacy Services, the Federal Government stepped in with emergency funding through to June this year, and a statement that it would 'ensure that Tenancy Advice and Advocacy Services funding is a condition of any future Commonwealth/State agreements'.

Now it's almost June... and the Queensland State Government is still refusing to fund the services.

There's a Commonwealth/State agreement currently being renegotiated: the National Partnership Agreement on Homelessness. The agreement states that one of the 'core outputs' to be delivered by States and Territories is:

tenancy support for private and public tenants, including advocacy, financial counselling and referral services to help people sustain their tenancies. [Emphasis added]

It is difficult to see how much more plainly the necessity of services like the Queensland TAASs needs to be spelt out.

We expect it will be spelt out soon enough – in mounting tenancies disputes, and in mounting numbers of persons evicted from their homes.

Meanwhile, the Queensland State Government is reviewing that State's Residential Tenancies and Rooming Accommodation Act 2008. To pick out just one of the numerous changes it is considering: in proceedings for the termination of a social housing tenancy, the Tribunal might be expressly prevented from considering whether the termination will result in the tenant becoming homeless.

One wonders what the Queensland State Government thinks it's doing as a party to a National Partnership Agreement on Homelessness at all. 

You can support the Queensland TAASs by signing the petition here, and keep up to date with their struggle here.

The public interest

If your idea of a 'housing recovery' is seeing house prices settling back down from their insane, fevered state, while you save your deposit and patiently watch the interest grow, you might not be quite so thrilled about yesterday's interest rate cut as some other stakeholders in the housing market.

You also may not be very impressed on being told it's a cut that you 'thoroughly deserve'. Just like you were probably a little miffed on being told that the cut in interest rates in December last year was 'an early Christmas present'.

Of course, changes by the Reserve Bank to the cash rate are neither presents nor rewards for Australians being good. In this particular instance, the cut has been made in the context of a highly overvalued Australian dollar, which has been a crushing weight on non-mining exporters, and a looming contraction in investment by the mining sector, on which the national income has come to increasingly – dangerously – rely. It is also made in the context of what remains an over-priced, unaffordable housing market, which may respond by simply sucking up more of Australia's now slightly cheaper money, at the expense of those sectors of the economy where investment is needed to properly adjust to the rapidly changing circumstances of the nation's trade.

These are big challenges and, as well as needing a response in policy, they need some frank explanation in public discourse. That's what the Australian people really 'deserve'.

Happy 255th birthday, Maximilien Robespierre

The Institute of Tenancy Culture Studies sends its regards to French Revolutionary and birthday boy Maximilien Robespierre.

(Maximilien Robespierre, 1758-1794) 

As a member of the Committee for Public Safety and leader of the Jacobin Club, Robespierre was the principal figure in the phase of the Revolution known as the Reign of Terror (1793-94), during which the young republic, beset by invading forces on all sides, widespread internal revolt, and economic chaos, executed some 17 000 French men and women in the name of revolutionary virtue. The Terror ended when Robespierre himself went under the guillotine... by which time the republic had repelled the invaders, put down the insurgents, stabilised its economy, raised an army that would go on to dominate Europe for the next two decades, and created a political program that would inspire revolutionaries and reformers for the next two centuries.

And ever since, the prim, dandyish figure of Robespierre has been an object of scholarly fascination – sometimes admiring, more often horrified. He gets our attention because of one curious, if apparently minor fact: he was a tenant. In all his admittedly-not-very-long life, Robespierre never owned his own house.

In fact, for the most significant part of his career, Robespierre was a boarder. In an earlier phase of the Revolution, when the Paris mob and their Jacobin leaders were violently repressed at the massacre on the Champ de Mars, Robespierre was given shelter in the home of a cabinet-maker and fellow Jacobin, Maurice Duplay. Robespierre's room above the workshop and courtyard would be his home for the rest of his life (except for short period when he moved out to rent an apartment with his sister – which Maximilien instantly regretted and soon ended to move back in with the Duplays).

It was not, it should be said, an ordinary boarder-landlord relationship. Robespierre was doted on by Duplay and his family, with not-strictly-virtuous treats of coffee, white bread and oranges (Robespierre would later return the favour, if in a dubious way, by nominating Duplay to a seat on the Revolutionary Tribunal). Visitors to Robespierre's room came away and reported the extraordinary way in which the Duplays' house was decorated, with a proliferation of little portraits and busts of their boarder peeping from the walls.

That's those who got in to visit; others record that the Duplays enjoyed keeping their guest to themselves and their own circle, and that Robespierre became inaccessible to a wider group of (former) friends and revolutionary colleagues after moving in to the Duplays'. One can only speculate as to whether the power of the boarder's 'master of the house' may have shaped the complex power-plays of the French Revolution, and the course of history.

The rent is too damn high - but why?

Keen followers of rental related reporting will have noticed some pretty dire headlines over the last couple of days. The ABC screams "Mission impossible for low income renters", the Sydney Morning Herald yells "Poor priced out of Sydney rental market", while The Australian exclaims "Dearth of housing for the poor".

Why is my rent going up again?

Some regional papers have jumped in, too, with reports from Broken Hill, Goulburn, Albury, Yass, Port Macquarie and Newcastle that high rents have made headlines locally.

The Daily Telegraph offers a slightly more subdued "Anglicare rental affordability report shows welfare recipient struggle to find housing", which gives us a clue as to what all this is about - Anglicare Australia has just released it's Rental Affordability Snapshot for 2013. The news is not good.

We wont go into the headline findings - they've been covered pretty well by the papers. Suffice to say that if you're on a low income - like a Centrelink payment, or a wage from a part-time job - your chances of finding something decent to rent in the private rental market are pretty slim. Well, almost non-existent, actually. This is not just in Sydney, it's across New South Wales, and it's across the country.

For keen followers of rental related reporting this should come as no great surprise, even if it does fly a little in the face of current reporting conventions. We already know the rent is too damn high. It's kind of nice to think that others are getting this message - at least for a day or two - thanks to the work of Anglicare Australia. But it's a shame that the conversation tends to stop there. Who is asking the next question: why is the rent so high? And what happens to those of us who can't afford it?

As it happens, we were in attendance at the recent Shelter NSW conference "Hot Topics in Housing Policy", where one Emilio Ferrer of Sphere delivered a presentation called "The Private Rental Market - Affordability and Homelessness". Ferrer observes a correlation between rising rates of people seeking to access homelessness services, and rising rents in the private rental market. He says that these rises are not the product of economic indicators such as GDP, unemployment or wage growth. Nor are they the result of a decline in the availability of social housing properties. Instead, he says, they are the result of chronic underinvestment in housing supply by the private sector, which has resulted in a consistently low vacancy rate over several years.

"The effect of this on tenants," he suggests, "is that it's a landlord's market. Some tenants are priced out of the market, and some tenants are selected out of the market". By this he means that it becomes easier for landlords to pick and choose tenants, because when vacancies are low, competition is high, and the pool of applicants for an affordable property will be much larger. Applications from those with lower incomes will be some of the first to hit the culling room floor.

You can find the slides from Ferrer's presentation (as well as others from the conference) here. We think he's pretty much on the money. As we've alluded to before, current policies that are said to encourage private investment in rental housing just aren't producing enough new stock. According to Ferrer's data, it doesn't even come close - in order to get back on track we'd need to build about twice the number of new dwellings than were built in 2011/12, every year, for the next twelve years.

But there's something else to consider here. Not every tenant who finds their options limited by what they can afford ends up homeless. As we said in this previous post:

In the real world, of course, people do consider the affordability of housing when they decide whether to leave the parental home, or the share house, and form a household of their own, and demand some housing – owner-occupied or rented – of their own. And some of those already out there in the housing market might look again at its affordability, and decide to withdraw, back to the spare rooms of parents and friends.

It's a curious balance. The answer is not just to "build more homes", but to build more homes that people can afford. This will call for a range of policy solutions - indeed, we should be looking at an entire national housing strategy - and as Anglicare's Andrew Yule has said following the release of the Rental Affordability Snapshot yesterday: let's not let this fall off the agenda.

Boarding Houses Act – update

A quick update on the partly-commenced Boarding Houses Act 2012.

('Houses', by Kevin Woods)

• The part that has commenced  – the Boarding Houses Register – is starting to fill up, and is now presented in searchable format on the NSW Fair Trading website. Proprietors of existing registrable boarding houses must register by 30 June 2013. After that, new proprietors must register within 28 days of commencing operations.
• Those parts of the Act that have yet to commence – in particular, the parts about occupancy agreements (Part 3) and the revamped regulatory regime for assisted boarding houses (Part 4) – we expect to commence in the next month or so, when the Boarding Houses Regulation 2013 and the standard form of occupancy agreement are good to go. Keep in mind that upon commencement there's another three months before the application of the occupancy principles becomes a term of every occupancy agreement.
• We were asked recently if councils could use their inspection powers under the Act to investigate whether premises were a registrable boarding house. We've had a look, and we say no: the inspection powers can be exercised only in relation to registrable boarding premises that are on the register, and only for the purpose of determining compliance with requirements imposed by the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979 and the Local Government Act 1993. Councils investigating whether premises are a registrable boarding house might look for evidence elsewhere: see section 100 for examples of the circumstantial evidence that may be used in proceedings to determine whether premises are a registrable boarding house.
• Any other questions? Try the TU's Tenants' Rights Manual, which now has a new chapter on boarding houses – read it online at the State Library.

The doctor is not in...

The release of the Grattan Institute's report on budget pressures on Australian governments has us all talking about taxation revenues and spending today. The report highlights two things - that we're not paying enough in tax to fund things at a level that we've become accustomed to; and that the majority of those things are actually education, welfare and health... Evidently it should be some time before we see a budget surplus in Australia.

Apparently we're getting more out of a trip to the doctor than we used to, and it's costing us. As the Grattan Institute's John Daley says:

The big driver, costing $30 billion, is extra spending on health. Contrary to popular belief the extra spending isn't being driven by ageing. It's that compared to 10 years ago, today's 60-year-olds see the doctor more often, have more tests, face more operations and take more drugs. We are getting something out of the extra spending, more people are staying alive, but the question is, who is going to pay for it?

The problem isn't entirely with who we tax and the way we collect our taxes, although this will inevitably feature in any discussion inspired by this report. Rightly so. But falling revenues are the symptom of our economy's bias toward market forces - it relies too heavily on private incentives to deliver social outcomes. When we look at that list above - education, welfare, health - we see things that a functioning democracy should regard as essential social services, the provision of which we all benefit from even if we're not frequent users of those services ourselves. They are the very basics required to ensure personal aspiration can reap its reward, no matter where you get your start in life. They are also necessary for a cohesive society that grows, develops and improves itself as each new generation of aspirant sets its mind to the challenges of the day.

But we can also see things that have undergone significant reform over the last couple of decades, particularly in how they are funded and delivered. There is a growing reliance, in each of these areas, for private forces to provide the service, and individuals to foot the bill. The government will reward your private investment - be it through a health insurance rebate, a discount for early repayment of your loan for tuition, or a co-contribution and preferable tax treatment to your superannuation - in order to reduce your reliance on government to actually deliver those services.

There's something missing from that list above, and that's housing. It is in the provision of housing that we can really see how our privately financed (ie market driven) service economy is creating some of our tax revenue problems. As we've argued before, our governments could achieve a great deal more through direct investment in rental housing supply, rather than the current approach of subsidising landlords, through generous tax concessions, who trade almost exclusively in second hand dwellings. 

But - and we've said this before, too - it runs much deeper than that. If you're building houses that people can actually afford to live in, you're not only building national wealth, you're building savings as well. You're building the foundation of a stable economy. From the outset, you're supporting jobs, but you're also supporting retail and service economies. You're building resilience and breathing life back into that aspiration we spoke about before. And when the nation is properly housed, we'll get far more value from our spending on education, welfare and health, too...