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Why disability group homes can’t be ‘fixed’

The Federal Government is promising to improve standards in disability group homes, but Robbi Williams argues this form of housing is so flawed and discriminatory it should be abolished.

Jan 23, 2023, updated Jan 23, 2023
NDIS minister Bill Shorten will outline further reforms to the scheme in a speech to the National Press Club on Thursday. Photo: Mick Tsikas/AAP

NDIS minister Bill Shorten will outline further reforms to the scheme in a speech to the National Press Club on Thursday. Photo: Mick Tsikas/AAP

A greater focus on the experiences of residents living in disability group homes is welcome and long overdue. The numbers of reportable incidents occurring within them, as revealed by a new National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) Quality and Safeguards Commission report, should concern us all.

A group home, sometimes called supported accommodation or shared living, is where a number of people living with disability are placed in a house together with varying levels of staff support.

Supported Independent Living (SIL) is the type of NDIS funding that pays for staff support, usually in group home settings. There are just under 30,000 NDIS participants with SIL funding in their plans across Australia, including about 2600 in South Australia, some of whom live in group homes operated by the State Government.

The Own Motion Inquiry into Aspects of Supported Accommodation report released last week examined about 7000 reportable incidents and complaints notified to the NDIS Commission regarding supports provided in the group homes of seven of the largest providers operating in Australia between July 1, 2018, and September 30, 2022.

The incidents include abuse, neglect, and unlawful physical or sexual contact. They don’t include unauthorised restrictive practices or reportable incidents yet to progress through the NDIS Commission’s reporting pathway. And, of course, they don’t include incidents that have not been reported at all. Therefore, as People with Disability Australia president Nicole Lee suggested, these statistics are likely “just the tip of the iceberg”.

The NDIS Commission pledged to “improve the lives” of the residents living in group homes in the future through better regulation and monitoring, as well as new standards. Federal NDIS Minister Bill Shorten echoed that promise, declaring it was time to “do better”.

Reflecting this, the report and its accompanying action plan identify ways to strengthen practices and accountability in group homes and are informed by an academic literature review that contemplates what good practice looks like, including stating that group homes should have six or fewer residents living in them.

Clearly, measures to improve standards and increase accountability can’t come soon enough for group home residents and their families, friends, and allies in the community. Raising our expectations about what happens to people living with disability placed in these settings is also critically important.

But there are much broader questions that the NDIS Commission’s report and Minister Shorten appear to have largely overlooked this week: Is the group home model fit for purpose? Or should it be discontinued as a matter of priority?

To put it more bluntly, can group homes ever be ‘fixed’? Is it really okay to jam up to six adults into a house just because they happen to live with disability?

Surely, the answer is no. No level of improvements in group home practices and accountability will resolve the fundamental problem that group homes reinforce and perpetuate discrimination and segregation of people living with disability in our communities.

These placements are not anchored on deep familial or personal connections, but on imagined compatibility based on similar support needs…

How so? Apart from people living in residential aged care, most Australians live in homes with people they choose to live with, and with whom they are likely to have already formed close bonds. These houses are homely: places of comfort, rest, renewal, and belonging, where people are free to be themselves, personalise their surroundings, and make decisions about who enters their home and on what terms.

Homes don’t usually accommodate strangers forced to live together. And homes don’t resemble workplaces with staff operations at their centre.

Yet, this is the norm for many Australians living with disability. If they are not living with family and/or do not have the private resources to enable an alternative housing arrangement, many people living with disability are routinely forced to live with other adults in a group home.

These placements are not anchored on deep familial or personal connections, but on imagined compatibility based on similar support needs, or on outdated economics of disability support, or because of scarcity in accessible ordinary housing.

None of these reasons are acceptable. They wouldn’t be acceptable to non-disabled Australians, so why should they be acceptable for a person living with disability?

Indeed, as a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, Australia has an obligation to ensure that its citizens living with disability have the right to choose where they live and who they live with – to have the same range of choices as other Australians. Various national and state legislative and strategic commitments to inclusion have long reinforced governments’ commitment to this obligation.

Even with improvements in standards and limits on the number of residents per house, the group home model can never fulfil this obligation.

If Minister Shorten is promising to “do better”, the only way to authentically achieve that is to make the decision now to discontinue the group home model entirely and invest in better alternative housing options that enable Australians living with disability to make informed individual choices about where and how they live, on their own terms, without discrimination and segregation.

The NDIS promises to enable each eligible participant to live an ordinary life. But life in a group home will always be far less than ordinary.

Robbi Williams is CEO of JFA Purple Orange, an independent South Australian social-profit organisation that undertakes systemic policy analysis and advocacy across a range of issues affecting people living with disability and their families. J

FA Purple Orange is one part of a group of not-for-profit organisations that also includes inhousing, a small community housing provider.

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