Chapter 4Commonwealth Home Support Programme
While the program has historically provided essential support, it was not designed to absorb the volume of clients now reliant on it due to the delay.
4.1This chapter explores the evidence received in relation to the Commonwealth Home Support Programme (CHSP). In particular, the capacity for the CHSP to meet increased demand for services as a result of delays in Home Care Packages (HCP) being made available, and the deferral of the commencement of the Support at Home (SAH) Program to 1 November 2025.
4.2This chapter also explores evidence received in relation to the planned transition of the CHSP into the SAH Program in 2027.
Capacity for the CHSP to meet increased demand
4.3The committee received overwhelming evidence that demand for CHSP services is currently far in excess of available funding, and that providers are forced to turn away clients seeking assistance. Further, submitters argued that CHSP services are not an adequate or appropriate alternative to the services provided by HCP funding.
4.4The Centre for Ageing and Research Translation (CARAT) submitted that the rate of CHSP service provision per 1,000 people has declined since 2021, as has total expenditure and per person expenditure. It submitted:
From 2021-22 to 2023-24 the rate of service provision per 1,000 people aged 50 years or over (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander) and those aged 65 and over (non-Indigenous) declined slightly from 179 per 1,000 to 170 per 1,000. Total expenditure ($2023-24 dollars) declined over the same period, from $3,135.8m to $2,989.5m, as did per person expenditure (Productivity Commission, 2025). On balance, these data suggest services to older people from CHSP have contracted in recent years, both in terms of the proportion of people served and the intensity of services received. A recent Anglicare Australia report has indicated that 100% of its providers were unable to meet demand for CHSP services, with the main reasons being funding restrictions (100%) and workforce shortages (68%).
4.5UnitingCare Australia told the committee that CHSP ‘can be a lifesaver for older people needing entry level assistance in their home and could be the intervention that prevents them from prematurely entering hospital or residential aged care’. However, it cautioned against conflating demand for the CHSP with demand for HCPs because it is ‘not necessarily designed to meet the complete and complex needs’ of those requiring an HCP.
4.6Mr Ian Yates AM, the former interim and then acting Inspector-General of Aged Care, in a personal submission, told the committee that the ‘CHSP does not have capacity to cope with increased demand due to the government’s denial of people’s right to HCP level services for assessed need’. Further:
…this should be self-evident. CHSP is by design a lower level of service than HCPs. HCPs are for people for whom CHSP is inadequate. It has always been a fudge for consecutive governments to claim in the quarterly Home Care reports that almost everyone who has not received a HCP has been made eligible for CHSP, as if this is “OK in the meantime”. It is not.
4.7Bolton Clarke submitted that ‘there is little that can be done to meet unmet home care demands between now and 1 November’ 2025. It explained:
For the most part, CHSP allocations are being fully utilised, with substantial waiting lists for services that are not visible in the same way as the home care queue likely to emerge by the end of the financial year as funding is used up. In theory, if pre‑planned, there might have been some capacity to scale up some CHSP services. However, to implement a CHSP expansion during the four‑month delay period, those plans would have needed to be ready in June when the deferral was announced.
Funding
4.8Professor Kathy Eagar AM explained that the budget for the CHSP is capped, and there has been a much slower rate of growth in funding for the program compared to either the HCP Program or residential aged care over the past decade. Professor Eagar noted that there were increases in funding for CHSP services in 2024–25, but these increases:
…were simply a partial catchup on the funding that CHSP would have received if its budget had increased at the same rate as HCPs during the last decade. There has been no real net growth, particularly as population growth and ageing more than absorbed the budget increase in 2024/25.
4.9Due to the CHSP having a capped budget, it has ‘no capacity to absorb…increased demand’. As a result, CHSP services must make ‘daily decisions to ration services and allocate care to those with the greatest need’, and ‘inevitably an increasing number of older people are waiting for services or getting less services than they need to live safely at home’. Whiddon submitted that:
…providers of CHSP are facing mounting pressure to meet increased demand without corresponding increases in funding or flexibility. While the program has historically provided essential support, it was not designed to absorb the volume of clients now reliant on it due to the delay. This risks service bottlenecks and reduced care quality.
4.10Mr Yates offered his endorsement to Professor Eagar’s assessment and further submitted:
CHSP is not adequately resourced for its own purpose, let alone trying to take up the huge care deficit that denial of HCPs is causing. CHSP demand is hidden and opaque – there is no national queue and no transparency as to unmet need. Older people have no easy way of determining where services are available, if at all, and often there are no waiting lists because demand is so high.
Declining clients and practicing out of scope
4.11The committee heard from a number of service providers who stated that they are both having to turn away older Australians seeking assistance, and are finding their staff having to provide additional emergency assistance that is beyond their normal scope of practice, or is unfunded by the Australian Government. For example, Southern Cross Care Queensland (SCCQ) told the committee that it has been:
…forced to turn away clients who are seeking help with tasks like cleaning, laundry, and meal preparation. For many, these are the first areas where ageing becomes a barrier, and timely support is critical to preventing further decline and preserving their quality of life at home.
4.12Flexi Care Inc, a community-owned not-for profit provider of aged care services based in Brisbane, similarly stated that ‘there is no capacity for CHSP to meet the increased demand…[and] many of the CHSP providers in our area are also closed to new clients in most service categories’. It noted that approximately 30 per cent of its clients accessing CHSP services have:
…already been independently assessed as needing a Home Care Package and are on the waiting list for one to be allocated to them. These people tend to have very high needs, and we are doing our best to support them through CHSP.
4.13Flexi Care Inc also told the committee that it in the past year it delivered $138,000 worth of services to existing clients who were at risk of a hospital admission or premature transfer to residential care if assistance was not provided. Of particular note is that these services, which were mainly personal care services, were not funded by the government as Flexi Care Inc had already exhausted its CHSP output allocation. It stated:
We paid for these services from our own financial reserves, but would not be able to do this again in the current financial year. (We had tried several times to obtain additional funding but were advised that this was not possible.)
4.14Other submitters told the committee that the CHSP ‘cannot meet the complete needs of those awaiting HCPs’ and that it is ‘not a substitute or solution for delayed release of HCPs’. Your Side Australia, an approved aged care provider of services in Sydney, told the committee that:
CHSP is for entry level supports, however due to delays in assigning packages often supports older people with higher clinical needs. This can present clinical risks without proper clinical governance systems in place.
4.15Meals on Wheels NSW and Meals on Wheels Victoria, in a joint submission, stated that as a result of many older Australians being unable to access an HCP in a timely manner, ‘many CHSP providers are servicing clients well beyond the scope and design of the program’. It stated:
Clients are now routinely presenting with:
Higher levels of frailty and dependency on daily support;
Nutritional and welfare needs more consistent with Level 3–4 HCP recipients;
Mental health risks and social isolation issues stemming from prolonged delays in care access.
4.16Mr Yates submitted that ‘people who need CHSP services are often not able to access them because of the pressure on CHSP from people who should be on HCPs’. Further:
Those people then deteriorate and need an HCP. When this is denied them, despite being assessed as eligible, they often deteriorate and end up in hospital (avoidably), or end up prematurely or avoidably in residential care.
4.17Mr Yates concluded:
Ironically this all means that the Commonwealth Government not properly resourcing CHSP and denying access to HCPs to people legible for them, all costs the taxpayer higher per person cost, as both residential and hospital care significantly exceed the costs of HCPs. The system design produces poor outcomes at higher cost!! [emphasis in original]
Thin markets
4.18Thin markets, or markets with a small number of aged care service providers, include rural and remote Australia, and communities requiring specialised services such as culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities and First Nations communities. Western Australia and the ACT have also been identified as having a thin market for aged care services. The committee heard evidence in relation to the importance of CHSP services in thin markets, and the challenges of such markets. For example, Whiddon highlighted that in rural and remote areas:
CHSP services provide essential low level services in the absence of other aged care supports. The lack of additional resources to scale up services in these regions is leading to longer wait times and, in some cases, complete service unavailability. This leaves vulnerable older Australians without even basic assistance.
4.19The Darwin Community Legal Service (DCLS) told the committee that in the Northern Territory current CHSP funding does not cover key needs, and ‘providers lack the resources to expand into regional and remote areas, where travel costs and workforce shortages are highest’. It submitted:
The impact is sharpest in rural towns and Aboriginal communities where no alternatives exist. When CHSP is closed to new clients, older people go without basic supports such as meals, cleaning, and transport to medical appointments. For some, this means leaving their community to access help, which carries cultural and social costs.
4.20Meals on Wheels NSW and Meals on Wheels Victoria jointly submitted that in thin markets, CHSP service providers are often the ‘only point of consistent contact older people have with the aged care system’. However, due to issues such as limited service choices, workforce scarcity and limited transport infrastructure, and an ageing volunteer base, providers are ‘doing more with less’. This includes ‘regularly stepping in to manage medication alerts, welfare checks, emergency meal drops, or escalate serious health risks — all beyond the scope of their funding agreements’.
4.21The committee received evidence in relation to the impact of thin markets and lengthy waiting times on the CHSP. Juniper Aged Care told the committee that Western Australia has the lowest provision of CHSP services per 1000 people over the age of 75 in Australia. As such, the CHSP is fully subscribed with no capacity to meet increased demand. It stated:
Analysis of Commonwealth Gen Aged Care data shows Western Australia is already falling alarmingly behind when it comes to supporting its ageing population. The data, released by the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, shows that as of 31 March 2025, WA ranked last for the number of home care clients per 1,000 population above the age of 75 for both the Commonwealth Home Support Programme (CHSP) and Home Care Packages (HCP) with just 133 and 43 respectively.
WA ranks as the worst in the country for CHSP and sits at equal worst with the ACT for HCP, despite having a greater percentage of population over 65-years-old at approximately 15.6% compared to approximately 13.5%.
4.22The Walpole Community Resource Centre (CRC) noted that in the Walpole region ‘there are no CHSP services available [emphasis in original] to act as a safety net for those waiting’ for an HCP. It submitted that the ‘reliance on HCPs is absolute’…particularly in rural and remote communities where CHSP services are non-existent’.
4.23The committee also heard from the Pingelly CRC, who developed the Staying in Place program – an ‘award-winning model of care’ that enables older people to stay living at home in rural and remote communities in Western Australia ‘until end of life if possible’. It explained Staying in Place does not provide services under the CHSP and its development was prompted by the rural and remote communities either having no CHSP services or ‘pitifully rationed options’.
4.24The Pingelly CRC submitted that the ‘CHSP experience has not improved’:
Usually due to difficulty finding staff under a traditional provider model of care, CHSP is not taking on new clients and/or continues to ration services to clients. There are manty examples of clients not getting any service due to lack of staff, or very unreliable and intermittent services. Clients often do not know who or when a support worker is coming.
4.25The Pingelly CRC also submitted that older people in rural and remote communities are denied agency in choosing their support workers, and ‘would rather go without than lose the power to say who they want in their home and who they do not’. It stated that:
Usually due to difficulty finding staff under a traditional provider model of care, CHSP is not taking on new clients and/or continues to ration services to clients. There are many examples of clients not getting any service due to lack of staff, or very unreliable and intermittent services. Clients often do not know who or when a support worker is coming.
Additional funding and flexibility for CHSP services
4.26Service providers such as Meals on Wheels NSW and Meals on Wheels Victoria noted that as CHSP providers absorb ‘increasing complexity, workforce strain, and demand – without a commensurate uplift in funding or policy support’. Further, ‘despite being a low-cost, high-impact solution, CHSP services…have had no major funding model review in over a decade’.
4.27A number of witnesses called for additional funding for the CHSP, or greater flexibility provisions to enable services to be urgently delivered. For example, Whiddon submitted:
Increased funding for CHSP could be applied to meet unmet demand until 1 November 2025. At a minimum, greater flexibility provisions, similar to those introduced during COVID, should be introduced to enable providers to deliver the services most urgently needed in their communities.
4.28Similarly, UnitingCare Australia suggested that increased flexibility in the way that activity can be reallocated across each service type under the CHSP would enable service providers to deliver where demand is highest. It explained:
…the current flexibility provision in CHSP allows for up to 50% of activity to be reallocated across service types. Consideration should be given for increased flexibility (up to 100%), in circumstances where the organisation has available outputs in service types where demand is currently low; there is demonstrated unmet need in other service areas (e.g. personal care); and the flexibility would directly support clients awaiting package assignment, ensuring continuity of care and reducing risk.
4.29UnitingCare Australia concluded that:
Enabling this increased flexibility would also help to prevent avoidable hospital presentations or admissions resulting from unmet care needs; and delay or avoid premature entry into residential aged care.
4.30Bolton Clarke submitted that there ‘is a strong case for increasing CHSP funding to meet unmet CHSP demand as opposed to HCP demand’. It also suggested that ‘one way to enable better allocation of existing funding is to allow existing CHSP contractors to reallocate funds between regions where they see unmet demand’.
4.31Meals on Wheels NSW and Meals on Wheels Victoria stated ‘CHSP is not a luxury – it is an essential and cost-effective component of aged care’ and yet ‘CHSP remains chronically underfunded and politically overlooked’.
4.32The City of Greater Geelong called for an expansion of the CHSP’s capacity and scope to better support complex health requirements before the SAH Program commences.
4.33Ageing Australia called for an expansion of the CHSP’s capacity through what it describes as ‘block funding’ – that is, funding that targets regions with critical HCP waiting lists and limited health sector supports.
Government response to increased demand
4.34The Department of Health, Disability and Ageing (the department) noted that to ‘help CHSP providers manage rising demand’, the Australian Government has:
Committed over $10 billion (July 2024 to June 2027) to deliver in-home care to more than 800,000 older Australians annually.
Provided $440 million in growth funding from November 2024 to expand high demand services.
Launched a $100 million targeted funding round to improve access to home maintenance, domestic assistance, transport, and allied health services in priority regions.
Introduced a $10 million First Nations Growth Fund to support new Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisations delivering culturally safe care.
Allocated over $20 million (2024–25 to 2026–27) to attract, train, and retain personal care workers in rural and remote areas through the Regional, Rural and Remote Home Care Workforce Support Program.
Absence of national waitlist
4.35Submitters highlighted the absence of a national CHSP waitlist as creating ‘a significant planning challenge’. For example, Aunty Grace submitted:
Without visibility of unmet demand, the system cannot effectively plan or allocate resources. This data gap risks normalising a dangerous default assumption that "a little bit of care is better than no care." We respectfully submit that this approach merely delays appropriate intervention, pushing vulnerable older Australians further along the care continuum and creating substantially higher downstream costs.
4.36COTA Australia told the committee that a lack of data and is ‘confusing’ and ‘discouraging’ for older people seeking care. Ms Patricia Sparrow, Chief Executive Officer, COTA Australia stated:
What we hear most often, is that people are excited. They get approved for a CHSP service, they look it up on My Aged Care, and off they go to a service provider who said they have availability, to be told that they don't have availability. In many cases, they're told they can't even put their name on a waiting list. It's confusing for people; it's discouraging. We need real-time data to some people from being in that loop.
Transition to Support at Home Program
4.37The CHSP will transition to the SAH Program no earlier than 1 July 2027. From 2025 to 2027, the CHSP will continue to operate as a grant funded program to support clients to remain independent at home.
4.38However, Professor Eagar, highlighted that both CHSP recipients and care providers are ‘very unsettled by threats to abolish CHSP and force all older people into SAH’. Professor Eagar stated:
Minister Butler has given an assurance that CHSP will be maintained until “at least 2027”. This was an excellent decision on his part. But it does not go far enough. Care recipients need to know what their longer-term options will be. Further, CHSP providers need to be able to do long term planning and make strategic capital investments. The decision on the long term future of CHSP needs to be made now.
4.39Meals on Wheels NSW and Meals on Wheels Victoria in a joint submission stated that the ‘lack of clear policy direction regarding CHSP beyond 2027 is creating enormous instability in the sector’. They explained:
Providers are hesitant to invest in systems, infrastructure, or workforce development without clarity about:
- Whether CHSP will remain a standalone program;
- What funding or service model will replace it (if any);
- How workforce roles and training will transition across programs.
This uncertainty is contributing to:
- Staff attrition and recruitment difficulties;
- Demoralisation of volunteers;
- Inability to plan for future demand or innovation.
4.40Anglicare Australia noted that the ‘staged approach’ to transitioning the CHSP into the SAH Program:
…intended to support CHSP providers to transition business operations, but it provides no relief for the thousands of older Australians dependent on the CHSP who are unable to access services.
4.41Professor Eagar made a number of recommendations regarding the future of the CHSP after 1 November 2025. Professor Eagar recommended it be maintained and expanded as a program, separate to, and complementing the SAH and that the CHSP have the following defined roles:
- A support program for people with entry or low level needs, defined as people requiring 6 hours or less a week of support. This cohort should be able to be referred directly to local service providers without having to navigate My Aged Care and without having to undergo a full aged care assessment.
- A support program for people with higher level needs and who are waiting to access SAH
- A program for people with high needs who elect to receive services via CHSP and not via SAH. This requires that care recipients are given a genuine choice, that CHSP service hours be uncapped and that CHSP can provide a case management service for those who require it.