The number of families with children waiting for social housing has jumped by almost 10 percent in six months, as new data shows Queenslanders are waiting almost two-and-a-half years on the social housing register.
Queensland Council of Social Service (QCOSS) CEO Aimee McVeigh said the wait time had jumped by more than a year since June 2019 and a growing number of children were being impacted.
Ms McVeigh said just under a third of all applications for social housing, or 7852 of 25,385 applications, were households with children.
She said this was an increase of nine per cent from December last year.
“Applications for single parent families increased from 6533 to 7082 over the same period and applications for couples with children increased from 694 to 770.
“The wait list time is a shocking indicator of a housing system under pressure.”
Ms McVeigh said the new data highlighted what services had been telling QCOSS, more and more families with children were struggling to make ends meet and paying the rent had become an expense people could not afford.
She said the number of people on Queensland’s social housing register rose from 43,782 in December 2023 to 45,473 in March this year, according to the quarterly data.
“A staggering 12,749 applications on the waitlist included persons that are flagged as homeless or at risk of being homeless, equating to half of all applications.
“The two-and-a-half-year wait has seen a record number of families needing desperate help in crisis hotel accommodation across Queensland.”
Ms McVeigh applauded bi-partisan promises to ramp up the delivery of social housing at a rate not seen since 1945, but said more needed to be done to address rental reform to help solve the homeless crisis.
“An affordable private rental market will help to ease the demand for social housing. We need to make the private rental market fairer for Queenslanders so that they have security and can afford to pay the rent to keep a roof over the head of their children,” Ms McVeigh said.
“We call on the government to limit the number of rental increases, end no grounds evictions, and implement energy efficient standards for rental homes to reduce the cost of living and improve wellbeing.”
