A social housing tenant reports a repair

The third leg of social housing, after access and delivery. More than 30 per cent of stock did not meet the minimum condition standard in 2023 — which is not a repairs backlog, it is a third of a portfolio below a floor.

housingA tenant in public housing reporting a maintenance fault, from the call to the repair draft compare across jurisdictions

63 days elapsed
longest dependent chain

9 discrete steps
across 4 bodies

92% waiting on availability
scheduling or queue, not assessment

0 days saved by concurrency
vs. 63 if run end-to-end

Where the time goes

Critical-path days only. Steps that run alongside others are real work but do not lengthen the process, so counting them here would overstate the prize.

queue	44d	Waiting behind unrelated work in a backlog.
scheduling	14d	Waiting for a person or committee to become available.
applicant	3d	Waiting on the applicant to supply or fix something.
assessment	2d	Someone is genuinely evaluating the merits.

58 of 63 elapsed days are spent waiting for a person or a meeting rather than for a judgement to be formed. Removing that time changes no assessment standard and lowers no bar -- it is the cost of scheduling alone.

The process, step by step

Applies when: A fault occurs in a social housing dwelling.

#	Step	Who	Why it waits	Clock	Typical	Basis
1	Something breaks application A hot water system, a door lock, a leak, an electrical fault, mould.	—	third party	—	0 estimate	—
2	Report it to the Maintenance Hub application A single point of contact within Homes NSW, with the call centre operated in-house. after Something breaks 60d slack	Homes NSW	applicant	—	3 reported	—
3	Categorise the request assessment Emergency, urgent or routine — which determines the response time the contractor is held to. after Report it to the Maintenance Hub 58d slack	Homes NSW	assessment	—	2 reported	—
4	Contractor dispatched referral after Categorise the request 44d slack	Social housing maintenance contractor	queue	—	14 estimate	—
5	Attend and diagnose inspection after Contractor dispatched 30d slack	Social housing maintenance contractor	scheduling	—	14 estimate	—
6	Repair completed assessment after Attend and diagnose	Social housing maintenance contractor	queue	—	30 estimate	—
7	Escalate to the tribunal appeal only if triggered A tenant may seek orders about repairs through the civil and administrative tribunal. Triggered when: The repair is not done and the tenant pursues it. after Repair completed	—	queue	—	120 estimate	—
8	Dwelling reaches the end of its serviceable life decision only if triggered Repair is no longer viable and the dwelling requires major renewal or replacement. Triggered when: Deferred maintenance accumulates to the point that repair is no longer economic. after Something breaks	Land and Housing Corporation	third party	—	3650 reported	—
9	Management transferred to a community housing provider decision only if triggered Tenancy management, and sometimes the asset, transferred — after which the tenant attracts Commonwealth Rent Assistance. Triggered when: The state transfers management to unlock Commonwealth Rent Assistance revenue for the dwelling. after Dwelling reaches the end of its serviceable life	Community housing provider	assessment	—	365 reported	—

on the critical path scheduling/queue = delay not caused by the assessment itself

Machine-flagged questions

These are produced automatically from the dependency graph. They are questions for a practitioner, not findings. Each one needs a person who has run this process to say whether the constraint is real.

Steps that may not need to wait

Contractor dispatched is a referral queued behind work by a different body. Does it consume that body's output, or is it merely sequenced that way by habit?

Proposed changes

A Commonwealth payment rule is the strongest financial argument about who should manage Australian public housing threshold
A public housing tenant attracts no Commonwealth Rent Assistance. A community housing tenant does, paid in full to the landlord as rent. So the same dwelling with the same tenant carries a maintenance revenue stream under one landlord and not the other.
The saving is booked this year and the bill arrives in a decade, on someone else's budget resequence
More than 30 per cent of NSW social housing stock did not meet the minimum condition standard in 2023 — four working facilities and no more than two major structural problems. A $1 billion program to fix 30,000 homes is that bill arriving.

Sources

In 2023 over 30 per cent of DCJ social housing stock did not meet the acceptable dwelling condition standard: at least four working facilities and not more than two major structural problems
Homes NSW received 24,592 urgent maintenance requests in 2023-24
$1 billion Repair and Restore maintenance program to fix 30,000 public homes; new maintenance contracts commenced 1 July 2024; a single Maintenance Hub established within Homes NSW with the call centre returned in-house
NSW: transferred tenants apply for Commonwealth Rent Assistance, paid in full to the new landlord; a key motivation for transfers is harnessing CRA funding previously unavailable to the social housing sector

Something wrong here?

This page is wrong in some way -- every page like it is. If you have run this process, the most useful thing you can do is tell us which step took longer than we say and why. Edit data/processes/nsw-social-housing-repair.toml and open a pull request, or send us the correction.