SUBMISSION TO JOINT STANDING COMMITTEE ON SIL
First some praise: I believe SIL funding has been the catalyst for more housing in regions with low rent (ie outside capital cities). In that sense, it has had an unexpected benefit.
I’ve always been concerned that bricks and mortar funding under the NDIS was too restricted. I never expected this relatively fast boost to housing availability could flow from how SERVICES are funded. That is a great outcome.
However, my personal experience in setting up a shared housing arrangement for my daughter has shown me that SIL funding strips the choice and control from participants – the exact opposite of what the NDIS was designed to do.
The trouble with the current SIL model of funding is that it is hard to find a suitable tenant because:
(a) very few people have SIL funding; and (b) anyone with SIL funding is generally very high needs. This forces a high-needs person to reside ONLY with other high-needs people; and (c) the high needs is almost always result of physical needs or behavioural issues.
Our personal experience is that this limits my daughter’s choice of tenants to:
(i) two other people in wheelchairs (I’m happy with one other in a wheelchair but, for reasons outlined below, consider two other wheelchair tenants as well as my daughter to be unwieldy), or (ii) a person with behavioural issues. We’ve accommodated many, trying our best to make it work. The latest tenant had OCD mental disorder, was a constant smoker and was bitterly unhappy all the time, resulting in threats of violence to my daughter and the other tenant, both of whom are vulnerable. Another person with behavioural issues we accommodated for a while screamed intermittently for no reason. My daughter was the only other tenant at that time. Being non-verbal and used to a calm environment, she developed anxiety in the first day or two of him sharing the apartment. I wept with sadness that, for all the effort I had put into making a home for her, the disturbance and stress I had most sought to protect her from all her life now resided in her home 24/7.
To expand my daughter’s choice of tenants, I have tried alternate models to SIL. When my daughter’s Plan was entirely self-managed I engaged staff directly as employees. This was manageable when my daughter lived alone but once she started sharing with another person (also with self-managed funding), the rostering and accounting became too much for us so we engaged a service provider.
Service providers find it easier to run a SIL house than one tenanted with self-managed clients. There are many reasons for that. Some valid and some not-so-much. I need more time than I have to expound on that but the key benefit of a SIL house I’ve discovered is the fact that SIL tenants need to give 3 months’ notice. Compare this to a regular tenancy where only 3 weeks’ notice is required of the tenant whilst the landlord must give 3 months. In the case of the self-managed tenant who was sharing with my daughter (mentioned previously) I was given one week’s notice, meaning the house-share fell apart almost immediately. That is unworkable.
I propose the following more flexible form of SIL, combining the benefit of SIL I’ve identified above whilst providing more flexibility of tenants by:
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Allowing property owners (or at least private owners) to rent less than the total number of
available bedrooms, even if only on a transitional basis. This would allow them to get the house up and running with just two tenants whilst they search for another/others; and
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Requiring that only two of the tenants in a home need qualify for SIL. This opens the door to
the third tenant being a person needing only drop-in support, or perhaps even a person without a disability – how inclusive would that be! When I was self-managing, my daughter shared with one person with a disability and another without a disability. This is not permissible/possible under SIL.
Bottom line: I do not think it is fair that my daughter (who is non-verbal, severely disabled and qualifies for SIL) be limited in the tenants she can choose based on the funding model.
My experience in setting up a SIL-home for her, as outlined above, is that she has no choice but to live with other people who have at least the same level of disabilities. I’d like at least one of her tenants to be verbal and without behavioural issues and I don’t want to have three people with high physical needs in the apartment. Even though the apartment is enormous (about 180 sq m internal), it’s just too crowded with three wheelchairs.