THE NSW government has rejected a proposal to use the Stockton Centre and Tomaree Lodge as temporary accommodation for homeless people, saying the sewage systems are not up to scratch and would take "significant" spending to fix.
The response, from the Department of Communities and Justice, has angered the welfare agency representatives and opposition Labor state MPs who gathered at the Stockton Centre at the start of the month to call for the former disability centres to be reopened as a short-term way of providing crisis accommodation to what they said was the Hunter Region's growing number of homeless people.
