Draft Waterloo Human Services Plan out for comment

REDWatch has put a PDF of the plan on its website so interested people can access it and provide any feedback. It is at Waterloo Human Services Action Plan - Draft for Consultation 25 October 2021.

The current draft has been put together by two coordination groups who have both been meeting every two weeks since May 2021 to work through the issues that had been raised by service users and front line service staff. Each group was made up of Government and Non-Government representatives, both as chairs and participants, with input also from Waterloo public housing tenants.

The draft plan is aimed at what needs to happen now rather than what extra will be needed as a result of the Waterloo South redevelopment. It is expected that participating agencies in the Collaborative will sign off on the plan in December and that implementation will start in 2022.

The draft Collaborative Action Plan deals primarily with issues that involve more than a single agency. Sitting alongside this action plan will be separate undertakings by the Department of Communities and Justice (DCJ) and Sydney Local Health District (SLHD) that deal with issues specific to the activities of those agencies themselves.

The plan proposes six priority areas of action to deliver:

1. Improved safety
2. Improved health and wellbeing
3. Improved communication and consultation and community participation
4. Improved customer service
5. Improved service integration and service accessibility for all service users     
6. Improved responses to systemic issues (and accountability) on an ongoing basis         

One of the early areas of work in improved Customer service is work to improve maintenance responsiveness. Work has already been started by the Department of Customer Service looking at Land and Housing Corporation (LAHC) maintenance and a meeting of agencies with about this issue has already been setup with LAHC to deal with what has been one of the most complained about areas of customer service by tenants.  

Initial implementation is proposed to be overseen by the two coordination groups that helped develop the plan. The Front Line Service User and Community Experience Coordination group primarily developed and will oversee initial implementation of the first three priority area. The remaining three priority areas were developed primarily by the Service Integration and Systems Coordination Group and initial implementation will be overseen by them. Individual actions will have a lead agency to facilitate the implementation.

Not every issue raised has been covered in the draft action plan. The groups have had to try and distil the issues and prioritise what they thought was important to tackle initially.

The plan is not static and is expected to evolve over time. Priority area 6, proposes the establishment of an ongoing mechanism that will allow customer service and human service issues to be escalated so issues will be able to be added and escalated on an ongoing basis.

Please take the opportunity to have a look at the draft plan and take the opportunity to make comments back to participating agencies or directly to the DCJ Secretariat at WaterlooHumanServices@facs.nsw.gov.au.

This plan has been prepared with a wide range of stakeholders around the table – 10 Government agencies, 8 non-government agencies and two tenant reps. This follows many years of work which we have outlined in our Waterloo Human Services Plan NGO Background Paper. Putting a plan together is only the first part of the puzzle. As we have shown in Human Services in Redfern and Waterloo: A potted history listing of plans, interventions, activities, consultations and reports having a plan does not guarantee success. Getting agencies to sign on to the plan is the first part of the challenge, getting everyone involved in making it happen will be the next part.