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Informed by DEC Housing’s submission to the Australian Government’s SIL commissioning consultation, August 2026.
Supported Independent Living is meant to make an ordinary life possible in an extraordinary set of circumstances – a genuine home, with the right support built around it. Too often though, the conversation about SIL gets reduced to hours delivered, rooms filled and providers rostered, rather than whether someone is actually living well. With the sector under fresh scrutiny through the government’s review of how SIL is planned and delivered, it’s worth setting out plainly what good actually looks like.
The single most important principle is that housing and support need to stay separated. A participant should be able to change their SIL provider without having to move out of their home.
Where the same organisation controls both the tenancy and the support, participants can end up feeling trapped. Raising a concern, or wanting a different provider, starts to feel like a housing risk rather than a straightforward service decision, quietly undermining every other safeguard sitting on top of it. This separation isn’t a technicality; it’s one of the clearest ways to protect someone’s genuine choice and control over their own life.
Quality shouldn’t be judged by how many hours of support are delivered. It should be judged by whether someone is living an ordinary life in a home that feels like theirs, rather than a workplace or an institutional environment.
That means consistency of support workers, genuine input from participants into who supports them, flexibility around routines, meals, visitors and community participation, and support that builds independence rather than dependence. It also means clear communication, transparent rostering, and a real process for reviewing whether the support model still fits the participant’s goals over time.
In shared living arrangements, this matters even more. Shared support funding shouldn’t mean shared lives. Each participant should keep their own routines and preferences, even where staffing is shared across a household. And matching housemates well deserves the same care as matching support workers: a vacant room isn’t just capacity to be filled, it’s a decision about who someone will be living alongside.
Real choice and control means participants have a genuine say over where they live, who they live with, who supports them, and their day-to-day routines, including the ability to change any of these if they’re not working.
This is especially important in regional and remote areas, where the temptation is to solve a thin market by concentrating support with one dominant provider. That’s the wrong trade-off. A regional monopoly might solve an availability problem on paper, but it does so by removing the choice it’s meant to protect. The better answer is finding ways to keep multiple capable providers viable in smaller markets, even where that takes extra effort or investment.
Some participants entered the NDIS years ago under legacy arrangements and still hold only a small placeholder amount of SDA funding, set aside until they find an enrolled home. In practice, some of these participants remain in older, institutional-style group homes without ever being told that newer, better designed SDA housing is now available to them.
That’s not really a housing shortage; it’s an information gap that quietly undermines choice and control just as much as a lack of options would. People can’t choose an alternative they don’t know exists. Participants in this position should be given proactive, accessible information about current SDA vacancies, their eligibility, and what moving would actually involve, along with independent support to explore it. That responsibility shouldn’t sit with the participant or their family to work out on their own.
There’s a real opportunity to get SIL and SDA working together more smoothly, without needing them delivered by the same organisation. Suitable SDA housing too often sits vacant while someone remains in hospital or aged care, simply because housing, support and discharge processes aren’t well connected. Better coordination here is one of the clearest, lowest-risk improvements available to the sector right now.
Good housing design and assistive technology also have a real role to play. The right home can reduce the level of direct support someone needs and increase their independence, which is good for the participant and good for the sustainability of the system as a whole.
Part of getting this right is better stewardship of the SDA market itself. Supply and demand for SDA aren’t well matched locally at the moment. Some areas and design categories have vacancies sitting unfilled, while others have long-standing shortages. The NDIA already publishes SDA demand data by location; using it more actively to flag emerging imbalances early, rather than judging the market by the national number of dwellings alone, would help get the right housing built in the right places.
There’s also room for more flexibility in who lives together. As a not-for-profit, DEC Housing isn’t chasing maximum SDA revenue from every bedroom – our focus is on sustainable tenancies and genuine compatibility between the people involved. Where it suits participants, that can include households that mix SDA-eligible and non-SDA residents, provided individual tenancy rights, compatibility and the separation of housing from support are all preserved.
None of this works if providers aren’t funded to deliver it properly. That means wages and conditions that reflect the actual cost of skilled, trained staff; sensible handling of vacancy risk in shared homes, so providers aren’t pressured into placing an unsuitable participant just to keep a place filled; and targeted support for regional and remote areas, where normal market economics don’t produce enough providers on their own.
For support coordinators and SIL providers, we think these are the questions worth asking of any arrangement: Can the participant change their SIL provider without losing their home? Is there a genuine say over who they live with and who supports them? Is there clear, proactive information about the housing options actually available to them? Is the model measuring real outcomes and sustainable tenancies, rather than occupancy or hours delivered? And is there room for the arrangement to adapt as the participant’s needs and goals change?
These are the standards DEC Housing holds itself to as a Specialist Disability Accommodation provider, and the ones we’d like to see become standard across the sector.
Read DEC Housing’s full submission to the SIL commissioning consultation.
