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Legislative Council - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2)
2020-09-24 Daily Xml
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Homelessness Services

The Hon. I. PNEVMATIKOS (15:10): I seek leave to make a brief explanation before asking a question of the Minister for Human Services regarding the homelessness reform Glasgow model.

Leave granted.

The Hon. I. PNEVMATIKOS:The Advertiser today reported on the minister's preference for the Glasgow model to address homelessness. The model was first piloted in 2010, and since then has not been used widely in the UK outside of Glasgow. A UK parliamentary reporter said:

It is claimed that Housing First is a better model to help those with severe and complex needs, but it is not seen as a replacement for all homelessness services and strategies. Its value is primarily as a supplement to existing strategies.

The Glasgow evaluation report also said:

Any dissatisfaction expressed by service users has related predominantly to substantial delays in the allocation of flats, reflective of current high demand for housing…

My questions to the minister are:

1. If the Glasgow model is the solution, then why did 43 homeless people die during 2019 in Glasgow? That is a city that has a population that's half the size of Adelaide.

2. Did the minister even inspect any other homelessness models when she visited the UK, and what were they?

The Hon. J.M.A. LENSINK (Minister for Human Services) (15:11): I thank the honourable member for her question. In relation to other places that we visited in the UK, I am happy to double-check all the places we visited, but there was The Passage and some other services as well that we spoke to when we were there before we went to Glasgow.

Part of the purpose of going to Glasgow was to attend the Institute of Global Homelessness conference, which is the organisation which accredits, if you like, the Adelaide Zero Project, and of which Adelaide is a vanguard city. There were a range of people from around the world, including Sydney, people from India, from northern America, particularly Chicago, which is also a city that has done a lot of work in this space. There were a lot of learnings from each of those.

Dame Louise Casey is the matriarch of a range of these programs and is the head of IGH and she attended. She has been to Adelaide a number of times–I think initially at the invitation of Mr Ian Cox, who at the time was running Hutt St Centre–and she has been instrumental in ensuring that we align the Adelaide Zero Project with the learnings from her work for governments of various persuasions in the United Kingdom.

I think I would take issue with some of the assertions that the honourable member has in her question, which are probably quite selective and inappropriate. The Glasgow model is basically a funding model for the non-government services. We fund the services we have in South Australia by individual contracts, as I explained in response to a previous question. The government sets the parameters, sets how much the funding amount is, then organisations individually bid against that competitively. It has resulted in what is a fractured system in South Australia, where people find it hard to navigate and where, if they happen to not fit the cohort of the offering available, they can sometimes be turned away, which is quite absurd.

What we are hoping and very confident will take place through the alliance model is that for each of the alliance regions the funding will match largely what is existing in those regions and that the alliance partners will form and they will then make decisions about how those services operate on a day-to-day basis. It means that if you have a service provider that's providing counselling, financial support, mental health support, they can all work across those services rather than having to make a formal referral between those particular services, which is what often happens at the moment.

I recognise that in regional areas the collaboration is often much better because they all know each other, and so a lot of those workarounds take place. Particularly in the metropolitan area, where we have a large number of outlets focused on different areas, we believe the arrangement is going to be much better. We are very pleased that the sector has been engaged throughout the process in terms of the consultation.

It is a new funding model for them to work with us, but there will continue to be a lot of support through workshops to help the sector to understand how those funding models will work into the future. We continue to work in collaboration and through lengthy consultation to ensure that we have robust, responsive services that provide the best outcomes for people experiencing homelessness.

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