Getting Better Outcomes from Australia’s Social Housing System

Identifying ways to improve the outcomes delivered by social and community housing services is a crucial way of addressing Australia’s ongoing housing crisis.

Australia’s contemporary housing crisis is placing enormous stress on social and community housing providers who are facing unprecedented demand for housing assistance and support right across the community. Identifying ways to improve the outcomes delivered by these services is a crucial way of addressing Australia’s housing crisis.

With colleagues, Professor Cameron Duff has recently completed research funded by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute exploring options for enhancing the ways social and community housing agencies identify, measure, evaluate and report the outcomes of the various services they provide to vulnerable Australians. Understanding the outcomes that matter most to Australians seeking housing assistance is a vital way of improving the design and coordination of housing services to ensure they continue to meet the needs of the community.

The research found that placing individuals and families in secure housing is the most important organisational outcome, identified by both staff and service users. However, unprecedented demand for housing support means that housing services are rarely able to find a secure home for everyone who needs one. For this reason, the research team found that social and community housing services also attempt to deliver a host of social, health and employment services to support vulnerable clients while they wait for long term housing. Delivering outcomes in the areas of economic participation in work or training, social inclusion and community belonging are crucial for Australians seeking housing support.

Social and community housing services seek to support individuals and families with both their housing needs and a host of additional health and social services, placing significant strain on agencies that often struggle with limited financial and human resource capabilities. Given the diverse scope of services that social and community housing agencies seek to provide to the community, tailoring coherent outcomes assessment and measurement tools has never been more important.

Suburban block of apartments

"...unprecedented demand for housing support means that housing services are rarely able to find a secure home for everyone who needs one."

Timely and rigorous outcomes measurement data can provide agencies with critical information to track changes in client demand, or areas of emerging need, that can help agencies coordinate service delivery more effectively. Formal efforts to identify and track the outcomes of community housing providers are also essential to ensuring that programs deliver value both for residents and the broader community.

However, the research revealed widespread inconsistencies in the outcomes measures, approaches and methods employed by social and community housing agencies around the country. The lack of standardised outcome measurement approaches is a key barrier inhibiting clearer assessments of the performance of the social housing sector as a whole.

We see a crucial role for national leadership in devising more consistent and coherent outcomes measures and approaches so that social and community housing agencies can focus on the outcomes that matter most to vulnerable Australians experiencing housing distress. We are at critical junction in our national debate about the kinds of housing futures Australia wants, and how social, economic, housing and health policy might be coordinated to achieve this outcome.

This research highlights the key role housing agencies play in helping Australians find secure housing, but also how much additional support they need in this critical work.

Author:

Professor Cameron Duff
Centre for Organisations and Social Change
College of Business and Law

Links to video or extra content:

https://www.ahuri.edu.au/research/final-reports/419

03 June 2024

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Getting Better Outcomes from Australia’s Social Housing System