Mr. Mike Allen:

I thank the committee for inviting us in to make the presentation and by its action deciding that this is an important issue to deal with. Focus Ireland is one of the leading national homeless organisations in the country. This is our 30th anniversary. We provide a range of services but probably the most relevant one for this purpose is that we run the family homeless action team, HAT, for the four local authorities in Dublin so that any family in Dublin that is assessed as becoming homeless is allocated emergency accommodation by the local authority such as a hotel room or a room in a B&B and allocated to our team. That gives us an in-depth insight into what is happening in families, which is unique and extremely worrying at the moment.

I do not wish to spend time telling the committee what members as public representatives all know because they all see the scale of the problem. However, to give a brief indication of it, in June last year, there were 247 families with 489 children in homeless accommodation and just nine months later in March this year, there were 471 families with more than 1,054 children in homeless accommodation. When we started doing this work specifically for the Dublin Regional Homeless Executive in 2012 there were approximately eight families per month coming into homelessness. That doubled the year after that and in the following year it doubled again. That is an exponential growth in family homelessness.

Members are all aware of that. I hope they are also increasingly aware that the number of families who get accommodated in emergency accommodation is only part of the problem and that there is an increasing phenomenon of families being assessed as homeless and not being allocated accommodation. The joint team that we run with the Peter McVerry Trust, as the intake team in Dublin, has come across 13 families with children bedding down in cars or in public places in March and April alone.

It is unprecedented in Ireland to have families with children considering sleeping rough. They have not slept rough because we came into contact with them, but I hope that is something every Member of the House and every member of the committee believes in absolutely unacceptable in Ireland and that everything must be done to prevent it from happening.

Everybody agrees on how bad the problem is, and that it is the worst problem in respect of families and singles homelessness we have ever seen. The question is what role rent supplement plays in causing the problem and what role it can play in solving it. There was a growth in the private rented sector over the last decade or so from it catering for approximately 10% of the population to catering for 20% of the population. The vast majority of families who are now facing homelessness were at work during the boom and made their homes in private rented accommodation. As a matter of public policy in this State, that was a legitimate and growing part of our housing provision. When they became unemployed they found themselves unable to afford the rent. The mechanism the Oireachtas has put in place to deal with that situation is the rent supplement legislation, under which people who are in need of assistance to cover their rent are to be given it through that mechanism. For reasons that are still hard to explain, over the last number of years the Department of Social Protection has decided not to fulfil the obligations under the legislation and provide people with adequate money to pay their rent. As a result, a large number of families are becoming homeless.

It is important to understand that when we talk about 71 families becoming homeless in Dublin last month the overwhelming majority of those come from the private rented sector, and the majority of them received rent supplement prior to becoming homeless. The majority of them would give the inadequacy of the rent supplement level as the primary cause of their homelessness. If rent supplement matched market levels, it would not solve our current homelessness crisis - we are not saying it is a silver bullet that would solve the problem - but it would reduce it very substantially and put us in a much stronger position to deal with the rest of the families who become homeless.

It is important to understand the two very important ways in which it works. The first is strict prevention of homelessness, that is, keeping people in their homes when they already have a home and are unable to pay the rent. The inadequacy of rent supplement means that families pay top-ups. It would be virtually impossible to find a single household in Ireland on rent supplement that is not illicitly paying an addition to that to the landlord. Every Deputy and public representative knows it, and it is a scandal that nothing has been done about it. As the rent goes up further, they fall into arrears and eventually end up being evicted. If the rent supplement was adequate that would be less likely to happen.

Even more significantly, where families become homeless many of them have long experience in the private rented sector and many have lost their flats or accommodation previously, but they were always able to find somewhere else. Now, however, if a family is evicted from accommodation and becomes homeless, as our colleagues in the Peter McVerry Trust pointed out, there is no prospect of the family being able to compete in the market because the rent supplement the family is given is totally inadequate. The only way to do so is to top it up. An additional aspect to that is that the way the rent supplement scheme has been handled over the last number of years means that many landlords are unwilling to deal with rent supplement, not because of a prejudice against people on rent supplement, although that exists, but because of an unwillingness to deal with the Department of Social Protection. While the Department is very good at customer relations over recent years, it does not consider landlords to be among its citizen customers and has not treated them in such a way. That will have long-term impacts.

What we are saying fundamentally is that we believe the Department of Social Protection and the Minister are not following the legislation passed by the Oireachtas, which states that the purpose of the legislation is to provide a payment towards the amount of rent payable by a person in respect of his or her residence. That is a significant cause of a large number of people losing their homes and it must be rectified if we are to have any possibility of beginning to come to terms with the scale of the homelessness crisis currently facing us.