We were surprised at the high number of complaints by village residents lodged with the NSW Government over 12 months, as revealed by the new village registry website released by the Department of Fair Trading.
From a sample of 20 villages checked randomly across the state, 14 had at least one complaint to the Department by a resident in the past financial year. Size of the village was not a factor, as seen in the chart above.
What we did notice is that the large private operators appeared to have zero complaints while the independents and the Not For Profit’s, large and small, did have complaints.
The risk is that the sector could return to the Kathryne Greiner days, where a media story based on ad hoc minor and personal complaints, were translated into being endemic across all operators, resulting in more regulation, costing both residents and operators, not to mention a hit on sales.
We were also surprised when we asked the Department how many audits it is conducting – the answer is an average of three every month, and these audits were the result of customer complaints.
“The majority of these inspections were unannounced, with sites chosen based on intelligence gathering and consumer feedback,” said the spokesperson.
Their emphasis is on the Rules of Conduct and staff awareness of those rules, and compliance.
For instance, training of the village manager is mandatory and an offence provision, but it is not being complied with by the majority of operators in NSW. This is a high risk for the operator and the sector.
Research regularly identifies that the No.1 cause of resident complaints is the village manager not responding to an issue appropriately.
Not complying with training and professional development will be a self-fulfilling prophecy for future damage to the sector. An historical fact.
