Nearly half of all people who sought help with homelessness last year in New South Wales did not get it, a new report has shown.
According to data from the Productivity Commission’s annual report on government services, 48.2% of people in Australia’s most populous state who asked for accommodation assistance from specialist homelessness services in the 2020-2021 financial year went without.
That figure represents a substantial increase from five years ago, when 37.2% of people did not receive the help they had requested.
The Productivity Commission report, released on Tuesday, contains detailed information on the performance of Australia’s social support services, including housing, homelessness, aged care, youth justice, child protection and more.
It shows unmet requests for homelessness accommodation services are increasing across Australia, from 30.2% of people going unassisted nationally in 2016–2017, to 32.2% in the last financial year.
But the problem is particularly acute in two of Australia’s three most populous states.
The situation has also been steadily worsening in Queensland, where unmet demand for homelessness services is at 35.9%, up 10 percentage points from five years ago, where it sat at 25.9%.
In Victoria, meanwhile, the percentage of people who did not get the homelessness services they requested has fallen since 2016 by 5.8 percentage points to 29.8%, though it had been trending slightly upward prior to 2019–2020.
The report notes Covid-19 funding and policy initiatives have affected the use of specialist homelessness services and that caution should be used when comparing data across states and territories.
Both NSW and Victoria put temporary accommodation schemes into place for rough sleepers (including accommodation in hotels and motels) during extended lockdown periods, with some providers still in the process of phasing out those programs.
However in NSW unmet demand for homelessness services had been increasing alarmingly prior to the pandemic, jumping 4.7 percentage points to 41.9% in 2017-2018 and similarly to 45.2% the following year.
This is despite the number of people seeking accommodation assistance from homelessness services in NSW remaining steady – hovering between 46,072 and 47,652 people a year over the past five years – and that state’s investment in homelessness services also remaining flat, at an average of $34.96 a person, per support day.
Victoria shows the biggest leap in investment in homelessness services, from $37.63 spent per person per support day five years ago, to $50.34 a person in the last financial year. In early 2021, the Victorian government announced a substantial investment in a homelessness transition program, From Homelessness to a Home.
Minor improvements to unmet demand in the homelessness sector could be seen in WA, SA and ACT. Tasmania has the most marked improvement, with the percentage of those missing out on homelessness accommodation dropping from 25.5% in 2016-2017 to 18.4% last year.
The Productivity Commission report drew attention to the significant knock-on effects of housing instability, noting: “Housing instability and homelessness can in turn increase vulnerability to adverse social and economic circumstances through, for example, poorer outcomes in education, employment and health, and increased risk of involvement with the justice system.”
Women and children experiencing domestic and family violence are disproportionately likely to be among those people seeking specialist homelessness services, with the report noting that 39.4% of people contacting these services identified domestic and family violence as an underlying cause of their need.
The Productivity Commission report only analysed known demand – that is, people who have sought homelessness services and had that need for accommodation identified, drawn from unpublished data from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare – and therefore does not capture those in the community who may have unidentified need.
The report did not assess the quality of homelessness service provision, despite that being one of the eight key performance indicators for the sector, as it said “there are currently no nationally agreed quality standards for specialist homelessness services”.
For those who have access to housing, rental stress – spending more than 30% of gross household income on rent – remains an ongoing issue, with low income earners particularly susceptible to housing instability in the private sector. The report noted that even for those people receiving commonwealth rental assistance payments, 45.7% still experienced rental stress.
The report did not make data on waiting times for public or community housing available, though these have previously been reported as varying between three months and more than five years, depending on location and individual circumstances of the applicant.
