Page 2684 - Week 07 - Thursday, 3 July 2008
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terms of staffing, and in terms of knowledge base relating to housing matters. The office will, of course, seek advice and support from other government agencies that hold particular expertise when it is relevant to assessment of housing providers’ performance.
Two tiers of registration will be established. Affordable housing providers will undertake innovative and entrepreneurial property development for low and moderate income earners, at arm’s length from government. Community housing providers will manage properties as the head lessee, utilising government-owned or other organisations’ assets, which they rent to low and moderate income tenants. They are generally small in scale and typically charge rents amounting to 25 per cent of income. In the first instance, CHC will be the only local provider able to secure registration as an affordable housing growth provider.
Currently there are five community housing agencies in a position to secure registration as community housing providers. While their activities are less risky, it is still important to protect the interests of vulnerable tenants. Registration will be governed by a set of appropriate registration and monitoring processes and this will include the registration of existing providers as well as allowing entry by new providers, including organisations from other jurisdictions.
The regulatory framework will monitor risks to service quality and tenancy and asset management practices, areas where poor performance would not necessarily trigger action under other legislation. The framework will ensure that the territory’s substantial investment in the sector, including transferred stock and new stock developed through subsidies and concessions provided by the ACT government, is preserved for future generations. This will ensure that the residual interest of the territory continues to be used for affordable housing purposes even in the absence of any contractual relationship.
The framework provides for proportionate regulation based on risk, with a focus on service quality, governance and protection of vulnerable clients. Higher risk activities will be subject to greater oversight, for example, property development as opposed to tenancy management. The risk assessment will consider the type, scale and experience with activities to be undertaken and the history of the organisation, including recent growth. Regulatory processes will monitor the activities of not-for-profit housing providers on a whole-of-organisation basis and will be complementary with other regulatory and reporting requirements, for example, the Corporations Act 2001.
This bill will empower the housing commissioner to exercise step-in powers as a last resort. These powers will be exercised in accordance with an intervention guideline, only after the failure of attempts to resolve issues with providers. These will enable the housing commissioner to appoint people to the governing body of a registered agency; appoint an administrator to control and direct the registered agency, wind up and distribute the assets of a registered agency and deregister housing providers that have breached a condition of registration.
The scrutiny of bills committee has asked some questions on aspects of the bill and I will address those now. The first question is: do the provisions that permit or require
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