National Dialogue on Universal Housing Design

HIA is a member of the National Dialogue on Universal Housing Design, which has recently released a Strategic Plan that sets out a 10 year roadmap to improve the awareness and uptake of universal housing design features in new and existing homes.

The National Dialogue was convened by Bill Shorten, Parliamentary Secretary for Disability and Children’s Services in 2009 and its members include residential building and property industry associations (HIA, MBA, PCA, REIA, RAIA), Stockland, Delfin and Grocon, along with state disability agencies and aged care representatives.

The Strategic Plan endorses an aspirational target that “all new homes will be of agreed universal design standards by 2020, with interim targets to be determined.” To assist in working towards this goal, the Dialogue prepared a set of voluntary model guidelines for ‘Livable Housing Design’, which are aimed at providing a national basis for any future consideration of universal housing design. The guidelines have three levels – silver, gold and platinum.

The first target under the Strategic Plan is to work towards achieving a 25 per cent take up of the silver level requirements by 2013. At the same time, the Dialogue has called on Federal and State Governments to commit to build 100 per cent of new social housing to the silver level from 2011.

The Government has committed $1 million in funding over 4 years towards the work of the Dialogue to undertake promotional and educational programs for consumers and the housing industry.

A copy of the Strategic Plan and Guidelines is available from the Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs webpage.