Submission to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee (Inquiry into the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment) - The Housing Connection Limited | External submission

Submission 2515

The Housing Connection – Senate Inquiry Submission – July 2026

Submission to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee

Inquiry into the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment

(Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026

The Housing Connection

Submitted by: The Housing Connection Limited

Author: Nicola Hayhoe, Chief Executive Officer

Date: July 2026

Contact: ceo@housingconnection.org.au

Note on the case study: The participant case study included in Section 5 of this submission is drawn from a real matter currently being handled by The Housing Connection. All personally identifying information has been changed and non critical clinical details have been altered to protect the participant’s privacy. The circumstances described – including the planning errors, the assumption of shared support, and the safety consequences – are recounted accurately.

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Submission 2515

The Housing Connection – Senate Inquiry Submission – July 2026

Executive summary The Housing Connection (THC) is a not-for-profit, NDIS-registered disability services provider based in Northern Sydney for 45 years. We deliver Supported Independent Living (SIL) supports, Social and Community Participation and core supports to participants living in their own home via ‘drop-in’ supports; to adults with intellectual disability, many of whom have comorbidities with a high prevalence of mental health and complex support needs. We employ approximately 98 staff.

THC supports a sustainable National Disability Insurance Scheme that is well governed and a scheme that enables the rights of people with disability and the capacity to live valued lives within their community. This matters to participants, to families, to THC and to the work force and communities that stands beside them. We recognise the pressures the Scheme is under and the responsibility of Government to respond.

After careful review of the Bill as drafted and amended, and drawing on our casework data, direct experience supporting participants through recent planning decisions and in consultations with participants and frontline staff, we provide seven recommendations with the intent to support the Bill to achieve its intended outcomes.

We hold serious concerns that the current Bill does not yet provide the safeguards needed to prevent avoidable harm to participants with high and complex support needs. These concerns are not theoretical. They are grounded in current casework, including the matter described in Section 5 of this submission, where a plan reassessment has already placed a participant at significant clinical risk. Hence, it is important that we respectfully ask the Committee to consider and adopt these recommendations.

We believe that adopting the recommendations below will help ensure the Scheme remains clinically safe, sustainable, and true to its purpose. Detailed rationales are in Sections 4 to 5.

Summary of recommendations Recommendation 1: Protect participants with assessed 24/7, clinical and complex support needs. Amend the Bill to explicitly recognise participants with high, complex support needs and those unable to leave their home without support, are exempt from blanket Ministerial support determinations under the Social, Civic and Community Participation (SCCP) and Capacity Building Improved Daily Living (CBIDL) categories.

Recommendation 2: Legislate the employment and health carve-outs. Move the carve-outs for employment supports and disability-related health supports out of policy guidance and into the primary legislation, with clear definitions to avoid interpretive drift at the operational level.

Recommendation 3: Establish a statutory escalation pathway. Require the CEO of the NDIA to establish, publish and maintain an escalation mechanism through which providers, families and advocates can trigger urgent review where a planning decision creates a foreseeable risk of serious harm.

Recommendation 4: Codify an evidence review obligation. Require that all supporting clinical and functional evidence provided by or on behalf of a participant is reviewed and considered before a plan decision is made, and that the decision-maker records how that evidence was weighed.

Recommendation 5: Strengthen safeguards on automated decision-making. Ensure that no automated decision can reduce funded supports for a participant without human review by an appropriately

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Submission 2515

The Housing Connection – Senate Inquiry Submission – July 2026

qualified delegate and publish the decision-making framework and standard operating procedures before commencement.

Recommendation 6: Sequence reform so replacement systems exist first. Do not commence the SCCP reduction settings, or transition participants to the new framework, before foundational supports and the operational detail of the Functional Capacity Assessment are in place and independently tested.

Recommendation 7: Preserve a viable, quality provider market. Ensure implementation timeframes, pricing decisions and expanded registration obligations recognise the operational and financial reality of registered providers and those whose continued viability is essential to safe outcomes for participants with the high and complex support needs.

About The Housing Connection The Housing Connection is a Northern Sydney-based, NDIS-registered not-for-profit disability services

organisation. For 45 years, The Housing Connection has supported adults with intellectual disability and complex support needs to live safely, independently and with dignity in their community.

Our services include:

Supported Independent Living (SIL), including 24/7 supports for participants with complex physical, cognitive and behavioural support needs;
Community access, coordination and capacity-building supports; and
Individualised planning and quality management aligned with the NDIS Practice Standards. Through this work, we have become a trusted voice in the sector—particularly for participants whose daily wellbeing, safety, health, continuity of supports and community participation depend on the correct construction of their NDIS plan. Many have high-risk needs that cannot be safely met through shared support ratios or generic funding assumptions. Our staff, allied health partners and families are typically the first to see when a plan does not fit – and the ones who must manage the consequences when it does not. We see firsthand how planning decisions translate into real world outcomes, risks and consequences.

This submission is written from that operational vantage point. It is not an argument against reform. It is an argument that reform must be built with the participants at the sharpest edge of the Scheme in mind.

This submission has been informed by our ongoing engagement with participants, their families and their formal supporters, and reflects concerns they have raised with us directly. Where appropriate, we have supported and encouraged participants and families to make their own submissions to this Inquiry, and we recognise that the strongest voices on this Bill are those of people with disability themselves.

Our Position THC supports objectives to strengthen scheme sustainability, improving integrity, address fraud, and modernise governance. We support the direction of the reforms that emerged from the NDIS Review and the Disability Royal Commission.

We also acknowledge the amendments to the Bill that have been progressed to date, including the narrowing of Ministerial support determination powers, the ability to carve out employment supports and disability related health supports, the additional safeguards on plan suspensions and status revocations, and the

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Submission 2515

The Housing Connection – Senate Inquiry Submission – July 2026

increased transparency around automated decision-making and pricing advice. These are meaningful improvements.

However, we remain concerned that:

The safeguards for participants with assessed 24/7 support needs and those with complex support needs are still not explicit in the primary legislation;
The employment and health carve-outs sit in materials that are more easily changed or interpreted narrowly at the operational level;
There is no statutory escalation pathway for cases where a planning decision creates foreseeable and serious risk;
Automated decision-making powers remain broad, with the detail of safeguards still to be developed; and
The pace and sequencing of implementation risks need to be addressed.
Commissioning approaches should not impact on quality provider diversity and the capacity to participants to choose who they receive services from.

The remainder of this submission addresses these concerns and recommendations.

Key concerns and recommendations 4.1 SCCP and CBIDL reductions The proposed Ministerial support determination framework, and the associated reductions in Social, Civic and Community Participation (SCCP) and Capacity Building Improved Daily Living (CBIDL) supports, are the reforms that carry the highest immediate risk for our participants.

For a participant with assessed 24/7, clinical or complex needs, SCCP and CBIDL funding is not discretionary or supplementary. It is often the funding that enables the participant to leave their home safely, to access clinical appointments, to maintain skin integrity through repositioning during community access, to have continuous observation for medical events such as autonomic dysreflexia, and to maintain the workforce continuity that keeps them alive. Supports operate as a system, not as discrete line items. Reducing one element can destabilise the whole arrangement.

A blanket determination applied through automatic plan renewal will not distinguish between participant need and for those for who the same category funds continuous, life-sustaining, one-to-one support. The consequence is not simply less community access. It is a foreseeable increase in preventable hospitalisation, avoidable harm, and workforce loss.

Recommendation 1: Amend the Bill to explicitly recognise participants with assessed 24/7, clinical and complex support needs as a protected cohort exempt from Ministerial support determinations under the SCCP and CBIDL categories. The exemption should be a matter of primary law, not policy or explanatory memorandum, and should be triggered on the basis of a participant’s assessed support profile.

4.2 Employment and health carve-outs

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Submission 2515

The Housing Connection – Senate Inquiry Submission – July 2026

THC welcomes the Government amendments allowing employment supports and disability-related health supports to be excluded from future support determinations. However, the practical reach of these carve-outs will depend entirely on how they are defined and applied.

In our experience, the funding that supports a participant to attend and sustain employment, or to attend and manage complex medical needs, is often not neatly separable from a participant’s broader SCCP allocation. Where the definitions are narrow or interpreted narrowly, the carve-outs will not do the protective work they are intended to do.

Recommendation 2: Move the carve-outs for employment supports and disability-related health supports out of policy guidance and the Explanatory Memorandum, and into the primary legislation. Provide clear, functional definitions that reflect how these supports actually operate in the lives of participants with high and complex needs, including participants for whom attending a medical appointment, a workplace or the community is only possible with one-to-one support and specialised transport.

4.3 Automated decision-making The Bill introduces expansive powers for automated decision-making in planning and funding decisions. The disability community’s anxiety about these powers is not abstract. The lived memory of Robodebt is fresh, and the potential consequences of a poorly designed automated system operating over the NDIS – where the outputs directly determine whether people receive the care they need to stay alive – are of a different order of magnitude. For automated decision-making to be safe, trusted and effective, its design and implementation must be approached with exceptional care. This is why we strongly recommend the Committee adopt our proposed safeguard, intended to ensure that automation strengthens the Scheme rather than exposing participants with complex needs to avoidable risk.

We welcome the amendment requiring publication of standard operating procedures before they take effect. This is necessary, but not sufficient. The safeguards must ensure that no automated decision, and no automated element within a broader decision, can result in a reduction of funded supports for a participant with assessed 24/7; clinical and complex needs, without meaningful human review by an appropriately qualified delegate who has considered the participant’s full clinical and functional evidence; and that AI is not used to override participant rights.

Recommendation 5: Legislate that automated decision-making cannot reduce funded supports without human review by an appropriately qualified delegate, and require publication of the full decision-making

framework,  standard  operating  procedures,  and  independent  assurance  arrangements  before

commencement.

4.4 Functional Capacity Assessments

The proposed Functional Capacity Assessment (FCA) is intended to become the primary access tool from 1 January 2028. Much of the operational detail remains to be developed, including how the assessment will apply to people with complex, co-occurring, and fluctuating conditions; what weight will be given to existing clinical evidence; who will conduct assessments; will appropriate time be allowed for FCA’s; and what review rights will apply.

These are not minor gaps. For participants with the profile of those we support – combinations of physical, cognitive, psychosocial and behavioural disability – a functional assessment poorly designed or applied by an

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Submission 2515

The Housing Connection – Senate Inquiry Submission – July 2026

insufficiently qualified assessor or without adequate assessment time will produce results that fundamentally

misrepresent their support needs. The recent experience described  in Section 5 of  this submission

demonstrates what happens when a decision-maker does not review the clinical evidence properly, even under the current framework. Hence, it is critical that the distinct cohort of participants with high and complex support needs are considered.

Recommendation 6: Do not commence the FCA-based access framework or the transition to new framework planning for participants with high and complex support needs until the FCA methodology has been co designed with people with disability and specialist providers, independently tested with a diverse cohort including participants with complex needs, and paired with clear guarantees on the role of existing clinical evidence and review rights.

THC also supports the amendments ensuring that participants cannot be required to undergo restrictive practices — including forced or involuntary medication — to demonstrate they have exhausted appropriate treatments and are eligible for the NDIS, and that any treatments participants are required to have tried must be reasonably available through Medicare, the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme or the public health system. These safeguards should be retained in the primary legislation without qualification. The right to freedom from involuntary treatment is a foundational protection under the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and no access framework should place a participant in a position where obtaining supports requires forgoing that right, or where eligibility depends on treatments they cannot practically access.

4.5 Escalation pathway and evidence review One of the clearest lessons from our current casework is that the existing safeguards – internal review, external review through the Administrative Review Tribunal, and complaints processes – operate on timeframes that are dangerously mismatched with the clinical reality faced by participants when a plan reduces critical supports.

A participant who loses funding for nursing catheter changes cannot wait months for a Tribunal hearing. A participant who has been reassigned from 1:1 to 1:3 daytime support cannot safely operate under that ratio while a review works its way through the system. The result is that providers either absorb the cost of maintaining safe supports at their own financial expense, or accept a level of risk that would not be tolerated in any other regulated care setting.

Recommendation 3: Require the CEO of the NDIA to establish, publish and maintain a statutory escalation pathway through which providers, families, guardians and advocates can trigger an urgent review of a planning decision that creates a foreseeable risk of serious harm. The pathway should have defined response timeframes, an obligation to maintain existing funded supports pending review where safety is at issue, and public reporting on volumes and outcomes.

Recommendation 4: Codify in the Bill an obligation on decision-makers to review and consider all supporting clinical and functional evidence provided by or on behalf of a participant before a plan decision is made, and to record how that evidence was weighed. Failure to meet this obligation should be a ground for expedited internal review.

4.6 Sequencing and foundational supports

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Submission 2515

The Housing Connection – Senate Inquiry Submission – July 2026

The Committee has heard from state and territory governments, providers and advocates that foundational supports are not yet in place at the scale needed to receive people who will move off, or fail to gain access to, the NDIS. The interim report’s recommendation that states and territories fulfil their National Cabinet commitments is important, but it does not resolve the timing problem for participants who will be affected by changes in the interim.

Recommendation 6 (continued): The Bill’s commencement provisions should be amended so that reforms with the greatest impact on the highest-need participants – in particular the SCCP and CBIDL reduction settings, and any automated application of those reductions through plan renewal – do not commence until foundational supports are demonstrably operating, and until the operational detail of the FCA and New Framework Planning is published, consulted on, and independently assessed.

4.7 Provider viability and market stewardship THC supports the intent of stronger provider regulation, integrity measures, and improved commissioning of SIL, Support Coordination and Plan Management. These are areas where reform is needed, and where done well, reform will benefit participants.

However, the compounding effect of expanded registration obligations, altered pricing arrangements, commissioning changes and reduced participant funding will place significant pressure on providers who deliver specialist, high-cost, high-risk supports. Provider viability and market sustainability is already at crucial levels.

Recommendation 7: Ensure implementation timeframes, pricing decisions and expanded registration obligations under Schedules 2 and 3 recognise the operational and financial reality of services delivering SIL and other supports to participants with complex support needs. Independent pricing advice should be published in full, and the commissioning framework should preserve participant choice and control and provider diversity.

Case study: what happens when planning goes wrong now The following is a de-identified account of a matter currently being managed by The Housing Connection. It is not a hypothetical. It illustrates why the safeguards recommended in this submission matter, and why we have limited confidence that the current Scheme can safely absorb further blanket reductions without additional legislative protection.

This case demonstrates the real-world consequences of planning decisions for participants with high and complex support needs. It is precisely why we have put forward our recommendations to ensure the Bill includes the safeguards necessary to prevent avoidable harm and to support safe, clinically informed decision-making for those at greatest risk.

The participant “R” is a 34-year-old man with permanent and complex disability support needs. He lives with quadriplegia acquired as an adult, Neurofibromatosis Type 1, autism, intellectual disability, bipolar disorder, and behaviours that may communicate distress or unmet need.

R is fully dependent on trained support workers for all activities of daily living, including personal care, mobility, bowel and bladder management, feeding, repositioning, and community access. He requires two

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Submission 2515

The Housing Connection – Senate Inquiry Submission – July 2026

person hoist transfers, an indwelling urinary catheter, ongoing allied health input, and continuous one-to-one supervision. He is at ongoing risk of autonomic dysreflexia, a life-threatening complication of spinal cord injury requiring immediate recognition and medical intervention.

R has clear preferences about how he lives, who supports him and how he spends his time. Continuity of workers matters to him, and his family and formal supporters have observed the impact on him when established relationships and routines are disrupted. R’s guardian and family have been informed of the current planning decision and are engaged in the ongoing response. The supports described below are not simply clinical inputs. They are the conditions that make R’s rights to autonomy, choice and community participation meaningful in practice. Reductions to those supports do not only create clinical risk. They narrow the life R is entitled to lead.

The planning decision On 14 May 2026, R received a new NDIS plan following a plan review. The plan:

Significantly reduced Core Supports, Consumables, Repair and Maintenance, and Capacity Building Improved Daily Living funding;
Assumed that R could safely receive shared 1:3 daytime supports, contrary to his assessed needs and clinical evidence;
Removed funding for nursing services to perform routine catheter changes;
Changed R’s primary disability from quadriplegia to autism, without consultation or supporting clinical basis;
Referred to R by another participant’s name in the plan documentation; and
Recorded that R uses “pull-ups”, when in fact he has an indwelling urinary catheter – a factual error that appears to have been the basis for the reduction in consumables funding.

During the planning meeting itself, the planner advised that the supporting evidence had not been reviewed. Despite comprehensive documentation being provided, key clinical information was not considered before the plan was approved. An internal review completed on 18 June 2026, initiated through the NDIS complaints team, did not correct the outcome.

The consequences The plan, as approved and as confirmed on internal review, places R at direct and foreseeable risk of:

Delayed detection of autonomic dysreflexia, with associated risk of stroke, seizure, cardiac arrest, loss of consciousness, or death;
Catheter blockage, urinary tract infection, and emergency hospital presentation due to insufficient nursing and consumables funding;
Pressure injury from inadequate repositioning under the 1:3 support assumption;
Loss of safe community access, resulting in increased isolation and functional decline; and
Deterioration in mental health due to the disruption of established supports and workforce continuity. What this case tells the Committee This decision was made under the current framework, with the current safeguards, on a plan for a participant whose clinical profile is not in dispute and whose supporting evidence was comprehensive. It was made by a

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Submission 2515

The Housing Connection – Senate Inquiry Submission – July 2026

planner who acknowledged, on the record, that the supporting evidence had not been reviewed. The primary disability was changed without clinical basis. The participant was referred to by another person’s name. The reduction in consumables funding was based on a factual error about the mode of continence management.

If a decision of this kind can be made – and can survive internal review – under the current settings, the Committee must consider what will happen when:

Ministerial support determinations apply blanket reductions to SCCP and CBIDL categories through automatic plan renewal;
Automated decision-making processes contribute to or drive plan decisions at scale;
The Functional Capacity Assessment becomes the primary access tool, with the operational detail still to be developed; and
Foundational supports are not yet in place to catch participants who fall out of the Scheme. The recommendations in this submission are designed to ensure that participants like R are protected in primary law, not in policy that can be revised at short notice or interpreted narrowly at the operational level.

Conclusion The Housing Connection supports the intent of the Bill and the need for a sustainable NDIS. We recognise the significant work that has gone into the package of reforms and the amendments that have improved the legislation to date.

Our concern is with implementation, sequencing and safeguards – the elements that will determine whether the reforms deliver better outcomes for participants, or produce serious, foreseeable and preventable harm for the participants at the highest-need end of the Scheme.

The extension of the Senate inquiry to 14 August 2026 offers a critical window in which to secure that certainty – through the primary legislation, the Explanatory Memorandum, or firm commitments on the public record. We urge the Committee to use that window to ensure that participants with assessed 24/7 support needs are explicitly recognised and protected as reforms are finalised, and that the safeguards proposed in this submission are considered in that light.

The Housing Connection would welcome the opportunity to appear before the Committee to speak to this submission and to answer any questions the Committee may have.

Submission to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee (Inquiry into the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment) - The Housing Connection Limited

The Housing Connection – Senate Inquiry Submission – July 2026