Social Housing Maintenance

I want to tell the House about Kate. Kate, who lives in public housing, reached out to me about a leak in her bathroom ceiling. After a general inspection in May, she was told to lodge a maintenance request. That was not as easy as it sounds. She called three times over two days, experiencing long hold times and call disconnections. When she eventually spoke to someone, she was disconnected again. Thankfully, she was sent a work order the next day. A contractor attended and took photos from inside the property, but it was too slippery to get up onto the roof. She was told they would come back two days later, but they did not show, even though she tried to contact them several times. Kate then reached out to Homes NSW, again facing lengthy wait times and disconnections.

She was finally told someone would be in touch. Once more, nothing happened. She said that by early August there was black mould and mushrooms were growing on her bathroom walls. She has also been told her rent is increasing. As you can imagine, she is experiencing health issues and is incredibly anxious. She just wants to live in a healthy home. Someone finally came out last week, added silicon to a crack in the skylight and closed the work order. But Kate can still hear dripping and says, "The leak is coming through the roof, so I'll need to lodge another maintenance request."

Mary also lives in public housing. Mary has waited about a year for her unstable living room ceiling to be fixed. In around September 2024, contractors put up two wooden beams to stabilise the ceiling temporarily. Homes NSW acknowledged delays in dealing with Mary's matter as it transitioned to a new maintenance contract and application. That was last October. Come July 2025, work to fix the ceiling had still not been done, despite having a target completion date of late March. Early last month we were told the contractor left a calling card and would contact Mary the next day. As of last week, she had still heard nothing. She is too scared to sit in her living room and her bedroom ceiling is now becoming unstable. Mary turned 80 last Friday.

Unfortunately, Kate's and Mary's situations are not unique. Delays, poor quality workmanship, health impacts on residents and poor communication between tenants and service agencies—those issues were laid bare in two parliamentary inquiries by the Public Accounts Committee, which I sat on, into public housing maintenance contracts. In the five years between those inquiries, it became evident that service standards had not improved despite the committee making recommendations to improve contractual arrangements and address communication issues. In the second inquiry, which I chaired, the committee recommended a cost-benefit analysis to determine whether separate functions should be combined in one agency and greater emphasis placed on clearly communicated time frames for maintenance requests, their escalation and completion dates.

I am pleased that services have been consolidated under Homes NSW, although I had hoped that change would be swifter. Despite ongoing delays, I remain hopeful that the streamlining of services will help address the backlog of maintenance issues. However, communication with tenants remains poor. As I told Homes NSW in a recent meeting organised after I had reached out to the Minister with my concerns, tenants need to be updated more often on the status of their maintenance requests so that they are addressed within a reasonable time frame and the tenants have some idea of when they will get help. Finally, maintenance of public housing cannot be separated from the quality of that housing. We have some very old housing stock in Lake Macquarie. Minor repairs are often only a band-aid. I was told earlier this year that Lake Macquarie was set for the delivery of one new home—hardly enough to meet the need of the 813 social housing applicants in Lake Macquarie, and certainly not enough given the number of ageing properties needing major repairs and replacement. The bottom line is we need more and better quality social housing in Lake Macquarie—and in other locations, I know.

Are Mary and Kate's circumstances not compelling enough to get action? This is not a complaint about our local Homes NSW staff; they have been, and remain, as helpful as the system and the housing stock allow. But this is simply not good enough. I have appealed to successive governments to do more, and not just to do the minimum expected—and sometimes, unfortunately, not even that—but to give residents in public housing the dignity of living in fit-for-purpose homes. Mary, Kate and too many other clients of Homes NSW unfortunately are evidence that there is much to be done.