Mr. Mike Allen:

I thank the members for the opportunity to make a presentation. Focus Ireland is a homeless charity. We worked with over 8,000 people last year. This is almost a 25% increase in the number we were working with in 2010.

Our work divides into three key elements, one of which is the core part, namely, moving people out of homelessness into sustainable dwellings, with supports as necessary. The second part is preventing people from becoming homeless and the third is working with people while they are homeless. Regarding moving people out of homelessness, I concur fully with what was said by Mr. Bob Jordan of Threshold on problems in the private rented sector so I will not repeat those points. I will come to questions on social housing at the end. Suffice it to say that it is becoming harder and harder for organisations to move people out of homelessness. As Mr. Fergus Finlay was saying, sometimes one feels the agencies of the State are working against one rather than actually trying to assist one with the common purpose of moving people out of homelessness.

With regard to people moving into homelessness, people should now be familiar with the figure that approximately seven people per day register with the local authority in Dublin as newly homeless. This is an extraordinarily high figure. Focus Ireland, which deals with all the families who are homeless in Dublin, was working with eight families per month this time last year and is now working with an average of 16 per month.

Most of them become homeless out of the private rented sector or due to other factors such as family breakdown. When one looks at the reasons people become homeless, most of them are shockingly avoidable. With a bit of effort, imagination and insight, it could be transformed.

If more people are coming in and fewer people are moving out, what is happening with homeless services? What is happening is that homeless services are being cut. The HSE cuts have happened over several years - sometimes twice a year. While this Government and the previous Government have until recently protected section 10 funding, this year's funding has been cut by over 3%, which means a cut of 7% to 10% in many of our services. Funding for youth homeless services has been even more savagely hurt. The most extreme form of poverty in the developed world is homelessness. Luckily, we do not have starvation but we do have homelessness, and if we mean anything by protecting the vulnerable, it should mean protecting people who are homeless.

One of the key contributions we are making in this pre-budget submission is an investment in social housing. Over the past decade or more, there has been a complete reversal in the way the Irish State has seen the provision of social housing as its key function. In recent years, we have the provision of social housing as the function of the private sector with the State buying, renting or leasing it from the private sector in which it is built. Without going back over whether that should have happened and why it happened, it is quite clear to everybody that this process has failed and that we need to start re-investing in housing. We know Social Justice Ireland and TASC spoke about investment programmes this morning. We want to contribute to that by saying that the most significant thing we could invest in is social housing and that this would create jobs and homes.