Homelessness Services and the NSW Community Housing Register

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In this presentation Roxanne Shaw, Community Housing Registrar for NSW, outlined the new regulatory arrangements for community housing under which homeless services  - including the SAAP/CAP - sector  - will be brought into the community housing system, a position that hasn’t been the case before. As of the 1st May, Housing NSW will only provide housing assistance to those services who are registered. The regulatory code has been developed to work in a proportional way depending on the scale of the service, given that it is going to take in a very wide range of service types and scales. 

For example, it won’t be setting a rate for rent for SAAP services but will look to ensure that rents being charged are fair rents. Being a registered housing provider will work to the advantage of services who want to grow past crisis support to a small or large scale community housing provider.

There are 8 performance outcomes:

  1. Fairness in making tenancy decisions in accordance with funding arrangements and assessing resident satisfaction.
  2. Sustainable tenancies and communities, that is organisations need to have supports in place for tenancies to facilitate them in sustaining the tenancies. The measure here does recognise the resource issues for SAAP services in this area.
  3. Asset management, organisations ensuring that they can manage the assets via responsive and cyclical maintenance arrangements, for many of SAAP/CAP this will be covered by the leasing arrangement from Housing NSW.
  4. Sound governance, the effectiveness of the governing body in providing scrutiny of the service but not interfering in the day to day.
  5. Standards of probity, covering areas of policies in areas like fraud, or criminal activity.
  6. Protection of Government investment, to ensure that residents will have the housing long term.
  7. Efficient and Competitive Delivery of Community Housing, within the sector and not external to it and using feedback from review over the first years to inform the sector of the kinds of efficiencies that seem to be working in the sector.
  8. Development Projects, really only applies to organisations that are involved in leveraging equity into development projects.


The Registrar is very aware that when looking at the compliance to take into account the context of the service delivery, not only in the model of service but also the location of the service and the scale of the organisation, and also the particulars factors of the client being served that need to be taken into account when looking at compliance reviews.

Listen to the presentation from Roxanne Shaw.

Right click this link and 'save as' to download the audio file.

Find out more about the Registry and registering