Mr. Mike Allen:

Focus Ireland is an organisation dealing with housing and homelessness. Homelessness is an extreme form of poverty so we are concerned with wider poverty issues, including the Claiming Our Future campaign. We support the broad stance which entails a greater emphasis on taxation and economic investment and less emphasis on budget cuts and other cutbacks. Our budget submission, which members of the committee have received, focuses primarily on our core issues, which are homelessness and housing.

There are three main points. On rent supplement, we have been dealing with the same issues as Threshold and have the same analysis. Huge damage is being done to that sector, including the number of people who are being pushed into homelessness. The rent supplement cut has been a final factor in their becoming homeless.

In recent years, it has increasingly been recognised that the private rented sector can be an appropriate exit from homelessness. Historically, people have always sought social housing but with the regulation of the sector, private rented accommodation can be a good exit from homelessness. As we have come to that realisation and increased investment support into that, Government policy has made it harder for that to be achieved. The cost of keeping a person in homeless accommodation for the State - let alone for the individual or their family - is far greater than what we are seeking as an investment in rent supplements to take them out of that situation. A false saving is being made there.

Our position on that is the same as Threshold's, which is not to touch rent supplement. We are now saying that in the Dublin area the Government should adjust rent supplement by increasing the threshold. That is something we share as we get a sense of how appallingly difficult it is for single people in particular.

The second issue is funding for the sector itself. I have always disliked it when organisations say their funding needs to be protected. I am not referring here to the funding for Focus Ireland but about the wide range of funding for all of the homeless sector. The theory was that we would reduce the level of homelessness over this period and would therefore be able to reduce expenditure but because of the inability to deliver housing solutions more and more people are requiring each of these services.

Together with other organisations, we are putting in place a cold weather strategy to ensure that nobody freezes over the winter. It is an emotive issue but it would be more practical to talk to the committee about the cost to the State if funding to the sector was cut - whether through the HSE or the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government, or through not transferring the full children's budget to the new agencies, as was mentioned by Barnados. If those things do not happen, crises will occur and Ministers will put more money into the sector in very ineffective and inefficient ways. Not to cut would be a way of saving money.

The last point might surprise some people. We are arguing that there needs to be an investment in start-up housing again, particularly social housing, in the Dublin area, not across the country and not in areas where there is a huge overhang of unwanted housing. In two years time in the Dublin area there will be a genuine shortage of accommodation. Unless we start investing in that now it will be too late to deal with it.