Mr. Mike Allen:

To answer the question, one of the complexities in working out the implications is that it is certainly our belief that there is virtually no household in the country on rent supplement that is not paying a top-up. The Department of Social Protection says that it has never come across anybody paying a top-up. When people from Tyrrelstown came before the committee, however, one of them admitted to paying a top-up. The immediate response of the Department of Social Protection should have been to withdraw rent supplement and render the person homeless. I hope it did not do that, but we are in this complete hypocrisy of not knowing what is going on. No research has been done by the Department; it just asserts this. The risk, if one increases rent supplement by 15% or anything else, is whether it will be absorbed by reducing the top-up or whether the top-up will remain the same and the rent will increase. That is the dynamic that one does not really know.

At the moment, it is essentially not a crime but, rather, a breach of the rules by the tenant, for which he or she will suffer if he or she pays the top-up, but it is completely commonplace among landlords to do it and there is no penalty for their doing it. Therefore, some sort of greater penalisation, for want of a better word, of the landlords' accepting top-ups as part of the rent supplement package is one issue that could be considered. However, the longer-term solution must be the move to HAP. We have signalled a concern that the way the State is getting around this problem is that top-ups are now considered legitimate in HAP in many areas, thereby forcing tenants well below the poverty line.

Specifically on Deputy Ó Broin's question, we support rent certainty and the linking of rents to the consumer price index as the most appropriate index - not in an absolutist fashion if there are better ways to proceed - but that is what would work most effectively.

As the Deputy knows, it is very hard to get detailed information on duration of stay in emergency accommodation. However, we are examining the position of the families who would have been homeless when the directive issued by the former Minister, Deputy Alan Kelly, first came into place in December 2014. Of those families, the total number who were homeless then and are still in the system is in the region of 60. Some of them have come and gone over that period but approximately 60 are still homeless some 15 months later. It is worth informing the committee that Focus Ireland started a programme in 2011 working with all the families who were long-term homeless at the time.

There were 137 homeless families in Dublin at the time. As part of the project we moved all of them out of homelessness into secure accommodation. The crisis started with almost a clean sheet, which is something for which we should be grateful.

On the directed figure of 50%, the problem is that we know that local authorities are obliged to do it, but the figures and data which are published slowly and painfully show that most local authorities are having huge difficulties in achieving the figure of 50%, even with the directive in place. It might take a very long time for us to find out what their allocations policies are in the absence of such a directive. As an interim measure, we would probably settle for the publishing of data and then see where there was a problem.

The quality of the emergency accommodation provided is of huge concern. As we stated in our presentation, it must be set alongside recognition of the enormous challenge the local authorities' homelessness executive had in scaling up the response and the impossibility sometimes of finding any decent room. If we are looking at a situation in the coming two to five years where a significant number of families are still homeless, the questions of the quality of the accommodation in which they are living and its proximity to schools will need to be strongly addressed. As we put it, we need to support these families to remain resilient while they are homeless without doing things which would turn them into being homeless. That is a big challenge for the system.

We do not necessarily have the level of data or information we would like on the proportion of homeless persons who are migrants. The regional homelessness executive is examining this issue and we will also do so. There is a mixture of circumstances, including families who have been in Ireland for considerable periods. According to the 2011 census, an extraordinary number of non-Irish people were living in private rented accommodation. Therefore, it is not surprising that a reasonably high percentage of them are affected by a crisis in the private rented sector. In fact, the percentage is quite low considering where they were living when the crisis took place.