The Federal Housing Minister is...

As many others have observed, the new Federal Coalition Government's cabinet is a bit short on women. It is also short a Housing Minister.

(Dame Annabelle Rankin, Australia's first female federal Minister with responsibility for a government department. She was Housing Minister (1966-71) in two Coalition Governments). 

Instead, Minister for Social Services, Kevin Andrews, has responsibility for social housing, rent assistance, homelessness and housing affordability in the new government. Congratulations Minister Andrews.

With no disrespect to Minister Andrews, we believe that either he or another of his colleagues should be the Minister for Housing, with a brief for housing policy that extends beyond the social security system.

In the absence of such a portfolio, we'll regard the Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, and the Treasurer, Joe Hockey, as our unnamed Ministers for Housing. Congratulations to them too.

Tenancy Haiku

We're always on the lookout for creative ways to express ourselves here on the Tenants' Union's Brown Couch - and this week we thought it would be fun to try our hand at Haiku.

Here's one from Chris:

Section 10

Sharing a house with

A named tenant. We shook hands -

I'm out in the cold.

...and here's my own attempt:

Home for life

Written into law,

No aspiration of home.

No change comes with spring.

***

We'd love to see what others can come up with - why not give it a go?

If you're so inclined, Tweet your Haiku or post it on Facebook. Mention us, and we'll share it on.

If you drop us a line with your contact details, we'll also give you one of our fabulous 'Tenants Make Cities' shirts for your trouble.

UK v NSW: across the seas, we've boundless rooms to spare...

You might have noticed the UK's new 'under-occupancy rules' (coined the 'spare bedroom tax' by the Labour Party in opposition) have attracted the attention of the United Nations' Special Rapporteur on adequate housing, Ms Raquel Rolnik.

Ms Rolnik has recently visited the UK to investigate the situation there, and if recent reports are much to go by, she hasn't been impressed with what she's found. Then again, the designers and supporters of those rules aren't terribly taken with what she's had to say either.

A quick search of your favourite UK based news sites will give you hours and hours of reading material on the topic. We don't propose to comment on that story, because we're no experts on tenancy law and policy in the UK. But it does prompt a quick review of the UK's under-occupancy measures, so that we may compare them to what's currently being loosed upon New South Wales in the form of the 'vacant bedroom charge'.

We should note, and be very clear, that our understanding of the UK 'spare bedroom tax' is limited. We can read the same news articles, press releases and fact sheets as anyone, and that's exactly what we've done here. We do not profess to be across the situation in the UK.

But we have had a good look at the information provided by the UK housing and homelessness advocacy group Shelter, among a couple of other things. We reckon we've got enough to go on to be able to spot a few key differences between what's happening there, and what has just been written into policy in New South Wales.

With this in mind, let's take a look at some key similarities and differences between each of these responses to 'under-occupancy':

What's the same?

Each scheme will result in higher costs for tenants that are caught by it, through a reduction in a benefit to those affected. In the UK, that is a reduction in a targeted welfare payment known as the 'housing benefit'. In NSW it is a reduction in the rental rebate or subsidy that results in a reduced rent for low income tenants in social housing.

In other words, affected UK tenants will get less in their pockets, but will have to pay the same rent, and in NSW those affected will get the same in their pockets, but will have to pay more rent. The net effect will be the same - affected tenants will have less in their pockets once the rent is paid. Tenants who are faced with the charge will be worse off financially, unless they move from their homes, resulting in either a financial cost or a social cost.

What's not the same?

1. In the UK, every under-occupant in social housing is affected, while in NSW only under-occupants in public housing will be asked to pay more if they:

a) refuse to consider offers of alternative housing, in a general sense; or

b) refuse to accept one of two specific offers of alternative housing once they've agreed to consider offers in general.

In a way, every over-occupant is affected in NSW because they will all be asked to make this choice. In the UK there is no choice - the only way to avoid the payment is to not be an under-occupant.

2. The manner in which a tenant might move from a situation of under-occupation to some kind of form-fit-occupation (or whatever the term might be...) is quite different in the UK, as there is no single waiting list for transfer applicants. Each housing provider may have a different way of going about managing transfers - for example they might apply different guidelines as to how and when a transfer will be approved, and at what level of priority a new property will be allocated (see the Shelter UK website again for more information). But - in either case - that's before we even start to consider the likely availability of form-fit properties for under-occupants to move into.

3. In the UK, the adjustment to the housing benefit is applied based on the number of spare bedrooms - it's a loss of 14% for one spare bedroom, or 25% for two or more. In NSW, the subsidy adjustment is applied depending on the under-occupant household composition - singles will pay around $20 per week more, while households of two or more occupants over the age of 16 will pay $30 per week, regardless of how many spare rooms each household may have to which they are 'unentitled'.

4. In the UK, the bedroom 'entitlement' appears to be affected by these new rules. Tenants stand to lose the benefit if there is at least one spare bedroom in their house. In NSW, the charge is applied based on your 'required number of bedrooms', which is set out in the eligibility and allocations policy. This means that a household might have a spare bedroom that they will not be charged for, but two spare bedrooms will generally always attract the charge.

So, where does that leave us?

We can see from that quick overview that tenants in New South Wales will not be as immediately or severely impacted by our under-occupancy measures, as those experienced by our counterparts in the United Kingdom. Limited though this is, we might even convince ourselves that public housing tenants in New South Wales will at least be offered something of a choice. The option of relocation is available, if only in theory, for tenants who would prefer to pay the same for less.

But let's not let ourselves off the hook that easily. The simple fact is that for the time being, tenants will be able to avoid the vacant bedroom charge by agreeing to consider offers. This will be an effective cost saving measure for tenants, at least until those offers do start coming through. But sooner or later, for one tenant after another, those offers will start to materialise. The choice to be made will come into crisp focus, for one tenant after another...

Will you allow yourself to sink further into poverty, or will you move away?

We've just had a federal election that was largely fought and won on a 'cost of living' platform. If you want to find out what real cost of living pressure is, head out into the towns and suburbs of New South Wales, and talk to low-income tenants in public housing. Ask them how they're planning to meet a $20 per week rise in the cost of living.

To add to the frustration, Housing NSW says they'd rather have your spare room than your extra $20 per week. It's a real shame that they haven't worked out a scheme that actually rewards tenants who want to move to a smaller property, rather than penalise those who can't afford to stay where they are.

Blind cord safety

Last month a little boy, Jack Mackay, aged 18 months, died after being strangled by the cords of a blind near his cot.

Now his parents and the NSW Fair Trading Commissioner are warning other parents to look out for dangerous cords, especially when staying in holiday accommodation during the upcoming school holidays.

Their advice is just as valid in relation to your own home.

Keep cots, beds and other furniture away from blind cords.

Keep cords out of reach, by winding them on a hook or clipping them to the blind.

Look out especially for older cords that are looped, or knotted or otherwise joined at the tassels. In most cases these can be made less dangerous by cutting the loop or the join, and fixing new tassels on the cut ends.

In some cases a blind might require a continuous loop of cord to work. These cords can be made less dangerous by keeping the loop taut through a cleat fixed to the floor or wall.

Cutting through cords and fixing cleats like this are alterations to the property, for which you should properly seek your landlord's consent. As minor alterations, your landlord cannot refuse consent unreasonably. And it is hard to think of any good reason for refusing consent for you to do these very simple things to make your home safer for children.

On average one or two Australian children die from strangulation by blind cords each year.

Tenancy culture study: Hood's 'Eviction at Hurstville'

Sam Hood was an Australian photographer whose career spanned the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, during which Hood did a bit of everything: news, sports, portraits, weddings, funerals. In 1935 he photographed an eviction, and created the subject of today's tenancy culture study.

(Sam Hood (1935) 'Eviction at Hurstville')

It is a subtly powerful image. Without histrionics or sentimentality, the image quietly commands the viewer's attention and directs it to meet the gaze of the evicted woman. You might, after a moment, look elsewhere about the image, and pick up some clues as to the woman's circumstances – the thin cotton dresses, the home-cut hair – but again your attention will be drawn to face her directly, separated by a gulf of decades from the woman, but also face-to-face with the indignity and injustice of eviction.

The woman's eviction was one of about 5 500 for which New South Wales courts made ejectment orders in 1935. As a matter of law and practice, renting then was, in many ways, quite different from renting today. Just under half the population rented (in Sydney, it was just over half). There was no Residential Tenancies Act. It was common at the time for tenancies to be for a period of one week, with the same period of notice for termination.

Over the preceding decades, there had been a number of attempts to reform tenancy law, with mixed results. In 1915, the NSW State Labor Government introduced the Fair Rents Act, which allowed tenants to apply to a magistrate to determine, according to the formula in the Act, the fair rent for their tenancies. In 1920, the Fair Rents Act was amended to prohibit discrimination against prospective tenants who had children; in 1926, it was amended again, to provide for termination on just causes only, such as non-payment of rent, use of the premises for 'an immoral or illegal purpose', or because the landlord required the premises for themselves or a family member.

These reforms didn't last; in 1928, a conservative NSW State Government amended the Act so that it would not apply to new buildings and, by midyear 1933, cease to have effect altogether. We can assume that the woman Hood photographed was evicted for not paying her rent, but as far as the law of the day was concerned, her tenancy could be terminated regardless of the reason.

Another short-lived reform: in 1931, as a response to the drastic deepening of unemployment, rent arrears and evictions in the Great Depression, the State Government (back to Labor again) introduced the Ejectments Postponement Act, which provided for the postponement of evictions where the tenant pleaded that they were impoverished through no fault of their own. It was not wholly effective: apart from the question of making the 'impoverished' argument, tenants could still be required, as a condition of the postponement, to pay compensation to the landlord and, until amendments were passed, the Supreme Court considered that it was not bound by the Act and could continue making ejectment orders. In 1932, the State Government (conservative again) legislated so that by the end of 1935 the postponement provisions would cease to have effect. In any event, they did not prevent the eviction of the woman in Hood's photograph, nor the thousands of others evicted from their homes the same year.

There was one enduring reform from this period: the abolition of landlords' old common law remedy of 'distress', whereby a landlord could enter a rented house and seize the tenant's belongings, to ransom or keep in satisfaction for unpaid rent. Distress had been legislatively chipped away at since the 1890s, and was finally abolished in 1930.

The woman in the photograph, therefore, might have been able to keep such belongings as she had; but she would have had few, bleak options for alternative accommodation. In 1935 there was scarcely any public housing in New South Wales. There was Daceyville, on which work had terminated prematurely in the 1920s, and Millers Point, and a few buildings constructed by the City of Sydney in Pyrmont (Ways Terrace) and Chippendale (Strickland Flats); but even these were for relatively well-paid workers, not poor and homeless persons. For the evicted, there was family, or charity.

*

There is, of course, another person in Hood's photograph: the woman's daughter. Her attention is elsewhere, caught by something beyond the frame of the image. We might look beyond the circumstances of the eviction too, to what would lie ahead for her, in terms of her housing.

Soon, renting laws would be reformed again: in 1939, on the outbreak of the Second World War, the NSW State Government resurrected the Fair Rents Act (ironically, it was the conservative government that did it). First under this Act, then under Federal Government war-time price regulations, and then under the Landlord and Tenant (Amendment) Act 1948, tenants were protected by strong legal protections against unfair rents and terminations. By the 1950s, however, by which time the girl in the photograph would have been a young woman, the 1948 Act was being legislatively curtailed, with fewer and fewer premises subject to its controls.

She may have found secure rental housing in public housing. Following the establishment of the NSW Housing Commission in 1942, and the Commonwealth-State Housing Agreement in 1945, the previously meagre public housing sector grew rapidly: to 1956, about one in six dwellings built in New South Wales was built by the Commission.

It's more likely that she would have found secure housing in owner-occupation. The prospect must have seemed dim in 1935, but after 1945 the rate of home ownership leaped, and kept growing until it peaked above 70 per cent in the mid-1960s, as more people whose families had always rented got into home ownership.

They got there on one or more of a range of things: full-employment; war service home loans and other government subsidies to housing finance; a burst of owner-building, particularly directly after the war; sales of rental properties by landlords chaffing under the 1948 Act; and after 1956, a huge program of sales of public housing to tenants and applicants. By the end of the 1960s, when the girl in the photograph had probably settled down with a family of her own, the Housing Commission had sold one-third of all the dwellings it had ever built.

If she is still alive today, the girl would be in her 80s. If she's like most 80-year olds, she'd still be living at home (at the Census, about one in five persons aged 80 and over were in aged care facilities and other non-private dwellings) and if still at home, the chances are very strongly that its owned by her or her family: about 88 per cent of those aged 80 and over live in owner-occupied housing. About seven per cent of 80 year olds live in social housing; just 4.5 per cent rent privately (of whom a small handful – a few hundred – are still covered by the 1948 Act).

The more things change.... For some time now, particularly for young households, home ownership rates have been declining. Public housing is in a spiral of decline so severe that it is undermining the continuing viability of the system. Today, almost 26 per cent of the population rents privately, and the proportion is growing (it's up 30 per cent on the proportion of privately renting just 15 years ago). For 25 years we've had a Residential Tenancies Act, but landlords can still give tenants termination notices without grounds. In 2012-13, the Consumer, Trader and Tenancy Tribunal issued 3 703 warrants to evict tenants.      

Public housing rent increases: part 2

Since yesterday's post on the public housing market rent confusion, Minister Goward's media release has gone up on Housing NSW's website, which helps clarify this misreported issue.

As stated in the media release, and discussed yesterday, Housing NSW has instructed the valuers who are calculating its market rents not to apply a discount 'simply because the property was being used as public or social housing'. Instead, 'a fairer calculation of market rent based on similar surrounding properties in the local area will be applied'.

To which we say: okay – but let's keep in mind that this fairer calculation should still result, in many cases, in market rents that are lower than private rents for that area.

The reason for this is simple: in many cases, public housing properties just would not go for the rents that 'similar surrounding properties' go for in the private rental market. Many public housing properties are older, and built to more austere principles than similar surrounding properties. Many are also in estates with more than their fair share of poverty, ill-health and other problems. If they were on the private rental market, the rent would be lower.

The Minister's media release gives some examples of the difference between public housing market rents and private rents. We think that it may be that some or all of this difference is fair enough.

A two-bedroom public housing apartment in Waterloo will be in a building of distinct appearance, austerely designed and built 40-50 years ago, in a poor estate. A two-bedroom apartment on the private market will be rather more flash.

Housing NSW's market rents should reflect these differences. The valuers should arrive at that conclusion by considering all the usual factors for determining the rent for a property. If they don't, and Housing NSW instead tries to increase rents to levels that don't reflect relevant differences, you should apply to the Tribunal – because the Tribunal can, by applying the law of the land, set an appropriately lower market rent.

For more information on challenging an excessive rent increase in the Tribunal, or to find details of your local Tenants' Advice & Advocacy Service, visit www.tenants.org.au.

Public housing market rent increases

Housing NSW is increasing the market rents for public housing tenancies. Usually this happens without a lot of public controversy, but this year it is in the news, following some comments from Family and Community Services Minister Pru Goward, and some puzzling interpretations by the papers. We'll try to clarify what's going on.

First, here's the basics of how rents work in public housing. Every public housing tenancy has a 'market rent', which approximates what the premises would go for on the private rental market, considering the location, size and amenity of the premises. The market rent is the rent on the face of the tenancy agreement, as increased from time to time by Housing NSW.

Most public housing tenants actually pay less than the market rent, because they are eligible for a low-income rental rebate, which reduces the rent they actually pay to 25-30 per cent of the tenant's household income. This is often called the 'rebated rent'.

Of the minority who pay the market rent, some would be ineligible for a rental rebate because their income is not low enough; others would be eligible for a rental rebate, but in their particular case the market rent is lower than the rebated rent, so they pay the market rent.

As we said, Housing NSW reviews and, in most cases, increases its market rents every year, to reflect increases in the market. This year, as it does every few years, Housing NSW has sent valuers out to do thorough valuations of certain benchmark properties, and on the basis of these valuations Housing NSW works out what it thinks should be the market rent for each of its properties throughout the State.

We understand that Housing NSW has instructed the valuers to do their valuations on the basis of the size, amenity, location and other factors pertaining to the premises, and that they should not apply any general discounts for the premises being public housing. Of course, in many cases public housing premises are physically different (eg no balconies; distinctively designed blocks; located on estates) from private rental dwellings of similar size in the same area, so the market rent may be justifiably lower for the public housing dwelling.

So far so clear. Yesterday, Minister Goward is reported to have stated that market rents will be increased so that:

public housing tenants currently ineligible for a subsidy, but who can afford it, will be paying the fair market rent for their property, rather than a discounted rate.

This may give the impression that there has previously been a deliberate policy of charging 'discounted rate' market rents and that a significant change has taken place. On the contrary, we understand that the only change to take place is the instruction to the valuers that in the practice of their art they should not do blanket discounts to come up with a market rent for public housing premises, but instead consider all the relevant factors and get to the market rent that way.

The news.com.au article confuses things further, by naming 'suburbs being targeted' by Housing NSW for rent increases. No suburbs are being targeted; market rents throughout the State are being reviewed and increased, and in some places the increases will be larger than in others.

Meanwhile, the Herald confuses things utterly, by reporting the issue under the headline 'Rents to soar as housing discounts get means-tested'. This is wrong: there's no 'discount' that's now getting means-tested. And to the extent that it conflates discounts with rental rebates and gives the impression that rental rebates have until now not been means-tested, it is wrong too.

At the end of it all, what public housing tenants need to know is this:

• If you pay a rebated rent, the market rent increase will not affect you directly, because it does not affect the amount of rebated rent you pay. 
• If you pay market rent, apply again to Housing NSW for a rental rebate and see if you're eligible. If you are, you'll pay that amount, if it's less than the increased market rent.
• If your market rent increase strikes you as excessive, you can apply to the Consumer, Trader and Tenancy Tribunal for an order setting aside the increase, and fixing the rent at an appropriate amount. The Tribunal will consider the general market level of rents, the state of repair, the amenities provided, and any other relevant matter (but not affordability), in determining whether the increase is excessive.  Talk to your local Tenants Advice and Advocacy Service for advice on making an application.

UPDATE: see our post discussing the Minister's media release.