 Right, thanks all and good morning So I'll present today a very general overview of the housing landscape for people with disability as it is today And what we might expect it to look during and after the NDIS So there will be those two parts of the presentation So I'll start with the sort of background just sort of looking at the current landscape and where people with disability live today So there are 4.2 million Australians with a disability Including about 1.3 million who are with a severe or profound disability Which means that it's a disability that significantly affects their day-to-day lives So where do those people live before I sort of present some of the statistics about their housing tenures and living arrangements I'd like to talk about three processes that affected the the landscape as it is today The first one is the institutionalization in the last three or four decades There's been a gradual process of closing down institutions where people with mostly intellectual disability and also psychiatric Disabilities have been living In 1995 there were still about 8,000 people with disability living in institutions today We're talking about something around 2,000 people. So it's still a substantial number But it's been a gradual change and that that obviously had affected the what you know the situation Another Second process that has been happening has been the increase in the life expectancy of people with disability Over the last century or so. I think that it's changing. It's different for every group and type of disability But for for example for people with intellectual disability in 1930 the average life Expectancy would have been around 20 whereas today it's around 60 or more than 60 So it's still well below the population average But it's a major change and it has significant Implications on everything including housing And I'll talk about that in the context of aging carers as well and Finally the third process which is related to not just to people with disability But obviously affects them significantly is the housing affordability crisis in Australia. So since about the mid 1980s the cost of housing as rose Well and above inflation and that affects particularly low-income households and people with disability with low participation rates in paid employment and of overall lower income have been affected by the housing affordability crisis probably more So than any other group in society So we'll move on to the next slide please so this is just a table taken from ABS data that compares housing tenures of people with disability and People without a disability in Australia. I think the first it's it's quite a deceptive Table or figure because if you look at the first Left column owner without a mortgage you'd see that people with disability are the rates are twice as high As for people without a disability and that reflects basically the fact that most people with disabilities leave or not most But many people with disability leave with a parent carer and many of them leave with aging parent carers who are outright owners So before we go celebrate high levels of owner occupation. We need to think about the context for that But if we look at the the other columns the public renter column That means that people living in social housing people with disability are significantly overrepresented in that housing tenure and I'll provide some more statistics around that and Private rental in contact in in contrast people with disability are underrepresented So it's very hard for people with disability to access private renter rental because of the affordability Challenge as well as other challenges that I'll talk about later I'll move on to the next slide where I'll talk specifically about people with disability living with with carers and particularly with elderly carers So around Australia we are talking about close to a hundred thousand people with disability We are over 25 who live with a parent carer now There are a few issues around that firstly why why do we have that situation happen for most Australians? 25 is about the average age where people are expected to move out of their parents home It's seen I guess in our society in our culture It's seen as a major step in the transition from childhood to adulthood and from I guess from dependency into independence For people with disability. It's very hard to make that transition Part of that until today has been the very limited access to support so to have that support to to live independently Those options just weren't there and they're still not there and hopefully they will be there under the NDIS So that would allow some of those transitions, but another barrier has been access to housing So moving out of the parents home you need to access your own housing and that's again the challenge of affordability Which the NDIS won't in itself solve and that's where That's what we're going to talk about today. How we do we solve that second barrier So one of the issues around that is that it's there's a normative issues there Do do we expect people to move out of their home when they're 25? Is that something that we need to expect everyone to and is that a choice that people make? but another question there is about I guess it's a more Pragmatic question is about aging carers the parents are not going to be there forever and what we're seeing today is when the parents die They are just no longer able to care for their son or daughter The son or daughter have to transition into supported accommodation Often under a situation of crisis That's not good for them as individuals and it's not good for the system Which is becoming increasingly crisis driven and it's affecting Everyone who already lives in that system of first shade supported accommodation and I'll talk a little bit about that as well All right, I'll move on to The shed supported accommodation system so about 20,000 people with disability live in government funders supported accommodation Most of them are people with intellectual disability about 70 to 75 percent I have another graph in the next slide which shows sort of the distributions most of those people would live in group homes Group homes are arrangements where you've got about between four to six people with a disability Living in the same house with a roster of staff who take a system with their daily living We still have as I said about 2,000 people living in large institutions and other types of congregate facilities And that's only the government funded accommodation There are other types of private facilities which are congregate facilities where people with disability leave There are a few issues with this system of shed supported accommodation One of it is that there's not enough of it, especially the group homes The waiting lists for group homes are extremely long It's completely crisis driven in terms of who gets access into it If you're not in the crisis if your parents if you if you're living with your parents Then you're not in crisis or if you you have to basically be in I Guess in risk of homelessness to enter some of those places And I guess flowing for that because of the unmet need and because of the crisis driven allocation system People have very limited choice about where they live in shed supported accommodation so they have no choice who they live with and where they live and Now the second point there about daily living lack of choice in daily living. I'm generalizing here I think some of the group homes are a fantastic great staff and Really working with their residents in a in a wonderful way, but some of those places are run in a sort of Institutional like model where people have very limited choice on very basic decisions such as what they lead for breakfast or where they're going out In the evening So that's part of the shared accommodation system and part of the problem that the NDIS will be trying will try to solve And I've mentioned just another last point there I mentioned the history of institutions. It's not a history. It's still on today There's still two thousand people living in institutions. There's a long history That's well documented of abuse neglecting institutions now I acknowledge that institutions today are not what they were 10 or 20 years ago But there's a real problem in in congregating large amounts of people with disability in a facility like that and there are some real tensions there about the choices that Families make about institutions and what the evidence shows about the reality in those institutions and the policy which is explicitly in favor of community living rather than segregated living now there are other people with disability who Experience very unstable and inappropriate forms of housing We have a very large group of people who are young people under 65 who live in nursing home or HKF facilities Which is considered inappropriate? Including approximately 700 under the age of 50 and homelessness people with disability particularly people with psychiatric disability but not only are highly represented among the population of homeless services users or homeless people in 2013 about 50% of all users of homelessness services were also in recipients recipients of the disability support pension and I think that Underestimates their actual proportion So homelessness is a real issue for people with disability particularly psychiatric So as I said more more and more people would be expected to move into independent living and I'll talk a bit more about what we would like to see Under the NDIS. I'll just want to talk specifically about private renter and social housing and to higher housing tenures where We might expect to see people housed so in private rental there are a few issues in terms of access into private rental First affordability which I've already mentioned It's very hard to afford private rental when you're under disability support pension when that's your major source of income But beyond that on top of that the housing stock itself is just not accessible for people with physical disabilities and because it's rental because it's There's no security of tenure there then it's very difficult to modify the stock You can't get a grant to modify a rental unit that you don't know if you're going to stay there more than a year or two and There's no guarantee that you'll stay there more than a year or two So there are barriers to to modifying the existing stock But even when there is stock which is affordable and accessible the evidence shows that In terms of for example affordable stock is actually occupied by higher income tenants And that's just because the way that real estate markets work. They always prefer people who have higher income. They're I guess safer tenants So that's a level of disadvantage as well as in some cases just pure discrimination of people with disability in the private rental sector so all those barriers mean access to private rental is quite difficult and We will probably need to think of ways to resolve that So social housing in in the absence of or with the difficulty to access private rental more many people with disabilities a very large proportion of them have to move into social housing as sort of the last alternative We have about 160 households in Social housing across Australia who have a member with a disability. That's about 40 percent of all households in social housing If you look at the proportions about 6.1 percent of all people with disability Compared to about 1.5 of all those without a disability Again like with like I said about shared supportive accommodation the first problem is that there's not enough of it There's just not enough social housing for all people with disability who need it and I get again flowing from that that means that there is no choice That means that when you apply for social housing for public housing and you wait a few years on the waiting list And when you finally offered a placement, it's basically basically a take it or leave it proposition So there's no choice about where you leave And there are some real consequences for people that might mean that they have to move away from their sort of natural support Circle from their family and the people who give them support the day require in a quite a significant way So so that's in a very I guess Just touching on some of the issues around social housing Next slide, please. I want to move on now to talk about the NDIS and how this is going to change What we've just saw which was sort of an overview of the existing landscape so I want to highlight three points about how I think or how researchers in the field think that The NDIS is going to impact the demand for housing as well as supply for housing supply offer housing first Just to acknowledge the NDIS will not cover. I mean it does cover in theory all Australians with a disability, but Those who will receive I guess ongoing long term supports. It's a smaller group It's a large group four hundred thousand people, but it doesn't cover all those I mentioned earlier with Severe and profound disability, which is about one point three million But four hundred thousand people is a very significant group and there will be more funding available for those people. So the NDIS Effectively doubles expenditure on those on that target group Now in terms of how the NDIS is structured it's going to be it's very different to what we've seen today So until today we've seen block funding for sort of shared supported accommodation things like group homes are funded as A service now it's going to be under the NDIS quite different. So individuals will have their own funding now The implications in terms of housing is that the funding is portable an Individual can take their funding package with them wherever they leave So that allows all sorts of housing transitions people can move if they can find the housing They can move with their supports and I'll I'll talk about some of the transitions that we might expect to see and Finally just before that finally the last point The NDIS does recognize independent living as something that they would like to see and if Supports that are required to live independently are considered by the NDIS as reasonable and necessary They will provide it so they will enable people to move out to live independently and there may be some I guess debates about which supports are Reasonable and necessary, but I guess that's sort of the I guess the principle so I think this is a Figure that sort of tries to summarize What I think are the three sort of major pathways that we're going to see sort of facilitated by the NDIS Three types of housing transitions First we'll see Individuals who live now will live with their parents adults with a disability living with parents will move into independent living Being provided support by the NDIS We'll also see people who now live in in specialist housing in shared supported accommodations or Institutions and that there might be two sort of pathways from there Some of them will actually move back with their parents because they'll have more support to live with their families Some of them would move again to independent living now independent living doesn't mean that they live on their own and receive no support It means that they might live on their own or sharing with others But also we'll receive whatever supports they need to retain that housing But it means that it's in private housing or mainstream housing rather than private either private or social housing So those are the three types of transitions and there's some historical presidents for that if we look at Support and choice in Victoria. That was a kind of Victoria's pilot program for individualized funding so quite similar in terms of the structuring of the funding to the NDIS and There were 920 participants who received individualized funding Fifty of them indeed moved from shared supported accommodation and you can see in those two figures where they moved to and That's I think that's something that we might expect something not very different from this under the NDIS. So In terms of living arrangements, you'd see most people moved into shared housing and most of those 50 who moved and A smaller proportion about 23 percent moved on their own to leave alone And there was a proportion of about 19 people who moved from shared accommodation back with their families In terms of the housing tenures and the housing arrangements Private rental was a relatively small proportion of those people about 19% Much larger proportion probably twice than that moved into public housing as well as other types of housing like aged care and sort of More innovative models like key ring models and maybe some models we might hear about today And as I mentioned some move it back with a family and in most cases that would be housing that's owned or In few cases rented and public housing Getting closer to summing things up and just before kind of talking about unmet need for housing under the NDIS What are the housing needs of people with this ability if we want to see those transitions happening into independent living particularly? What sort of housing would we need? Affordable housing that's that's a given Physically accessible housing for people with physical disabilities We're located housing and by where located I mean two things one that it's well located in proximity to services and Transport and amenities, but also on a more individual level closer to people's support networks if people leave too far away from their Sort of natural Informal support network that means the formal supports that they require the paid supports are much higher So well located house housing will save a lot of money for for the NDIS on support Housing needs to be suitable in terms of the mix of dwellings the number of bedrooms for example, there's a high proportion of Single-person households and want people with disabilities, so you need to think about how you design the mix of dwellings Housing needs to be secure and mean not just safety or physical safety, but also security of tenure so the kind of Security or insecurity in private rental is just not going to work for people who require Say for example home modifications that's not going to work for them so we need secure housing and We need housing that's integrated in the community rather than segregated housing because that's part of the vision of independent living and the NDIS that's the underlying principle there. Do we have all that housing out there? Probably not The NDIS estimates between unmet need for housing for between 80,000 to 120,000 potential NDIS participants now these figures are based on a very sort of rough estimate I think there needs to be much more research into that figure, but that's I think Sort of I guess the ballpark So that's the impact on demand, but what's the impact on supply? The NDIS said initially that they will not take responsibility for housing It's not their role, but they have indicated that they will invest capital funds in quite a substantial amount in Catalyzing new housing supplies. So almost half a bill more than half a billion dollars a year Into into housing into new supply of housing now We are all awaiting The NDIS discussion paper or housing discussion paper that has been promised for a while and hopefully that would clarify How that funding is going to be structured and how that might work and that would clarify a lot of issues but I guess some of the Hints that have been thrown here and there are that it might be structured a bit like Enra's with some lessons from Enra's Enra's is the national rental affordability scheme that has been Facilitating a new supply of affordable housing in recent years The NDIA itself the NDIS authority will not own housing But it and it will not borrow funds to to build housing So we will partner with other I guess stakeholders to do that to get funds For every dollar that the NDIS intends to spend in capital They expect to see leverage of about two to three dollars from other sources and those sources are probably going to be the community sectors and families of people with disability Will just provide money private finance as well as state and local governments And I think the the aim there is to try to to get land from from governments So that would significantly reduce the cost of building new housing So so that that's sort of I guess some of the principles there, but again, we're waiting to see what's What's the word coming out of the NDIA very soon? Hopefully So next slide, please. It's Just before I finish a few of the tensions that I think we should I think they might come up in the discussion today I'll just sort of touch upon those issues The expectation for leverage there's some questions about equity there So if you expect families to put in money, what about those families who don't have that money? There's going to be a real tension around And the IS is all about control and choice for participants But when they go out there and seek for housing assistance where it's as I said, it's a sort of take it or leave it proposition There's going to be a real tension there. How do you really achieve a choice and control in that sort of context? And I guess the third very contentious issue is Again, I mentioned the need for integrated housing in the community and there's some real debate in the community around what is integrated housing and Where the cluster type housing and congregate facilities are legitimate options are integrated housing in the community some parents groups say that this is not a segregated community, but an intentional community and But some of the research evidence is very much against those types of facilities. So there's a real debate And there's it's going to be difficult. I guess to there is there is a need for a real Yes, policy direction around that. What is the kind of housing that we'd like to see and what is legitimate? Types of housing that government would invest money into So just my last slide final notes a full scheme the NDIS will cause historically Unprecedented boost in demand for housing that is affordable accessible and well located But also a catalyst for new supply of such housing So it's revision with revolutionizing the disability sector and I guess it's now up to the housing sector to to rise up to the challenge and Hopefully today we'll have some good insight on how we can do this That's it