NDIS Review Update: The Removal of Improved Liveability category for new Specialist Disability Accommodation (SDA) developments
By Greg Barry, SDA Services Founder and Principal Consultant
The recent NDIS Review recommended that the NDIA should remove the Improved Liveability (“IL”) category for new Specialist Disability Accommodation (SDA) developments and review the remaining SDA categories and associated Design Standards to evaluate their effectiveness.
SDA Services, along with more than 60 of our colleagues in the SDA sector, have united to prepare and send a submission led by our Principal Consultant and Founder, Greg Barry and James Brown (SDA Plus), suggesting that this recommendation not be accepted by Minister Shorten. We believe that the SDA component of an NDIS plan should be designed to give participants access to all SDA participants who are SDA eligible.
Read the full submission here.
The group’s key messages to the government included:
1. Acceptance of the recommendation would be unfair for all NDIS participants who are IL SDA eligible, and the removal of this existing quality of safe support will cause high-risk consequences and harmful effects.
2. IL manifests Value for Money for the NDIS and, additionally, it provides other cost savings for the Federal government as well as for States’ and Territories’ governments.
3. Consideration of any change to IL, including its removal, is not currently informed by enough information, including from engagement with participants.
4. The fact of the recommendation and that a decision for it is awaited is having a harmful effect on SDA investment confidence broadly. Acceptance of the recommendation would see institutional capital leave the sector with unsophisticated, oftentimes poor-quality operations remaining.
We and our sector colleagues are able to provide solid case studies demonstrating excellent participant outcomes as well as research outcomes with substantial quantitative and qualitative data that highlights the clear benefits of IL for eligible participants. Such data includes the outcomes of a SDA lived experience survey which SDA Services independently commissioned. There is a very relevant comprehensive study by Dr Adam Crowe, Amity James, Gwyneth Peaty, Eleanor Malbon, and Katie Ellis of Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute Limited entitled Specialist Disability Accommodation in the Social Housing Sector: Policy and Practice.