Mr. Mike Allen:

I thank the Chairman and members for inviting us to discuss the issues facing lone parents. It is interesting that the joint committee is examining these issues with One Family, whose view is broadly focused on lone parents, and Focus Ireland, which has a view on homelessness. As neither organisation has much expertise in the area of the other, the joint committee may learn a great deal from examining the issue from two perspectives, and that is welcome.

Focus Ireland is one of the leading housing and homelessness organisations. We are appearing before the joint committee because we have been designated by the Dublin Region Homeless Executive as the homeless action team for families in the city. We are directly providing case management and support to the majority of the 1,000 homeless families in Dublin and other supports to the remainder of this group. With funding from Tusla, the Health Service Executive, the Department of Housing, Planning, Community and Local Government and local authorities, we are also providing children's supports to families which need them. We also do specialised work on young people, particularly those leaving care, and on Housing First, which is very topical.

Much of what we say is drawn from the experiences of the family housing action team and front-line staff working with families. This is augmented by the work we do in research and policy, an area in which Ms Connolly works. We are trying to bring both areas together, which involves a large amount of analysis, figures and so forth. Before addressing these matters, it is important to remind everyone that behind every number is a family, parent or parents struggling to survive in the circumstances in which they find themselves. These families are trying to raise their children and they worry about their children's future. This is a humanitarian problem and while we must use our brains and statistics when trying to address it, we must never lose sight of the fact that we are dealing with an issue that is fundamentally wrong and should not be allowed in society. I know everyone shares that view.

In our submission, we have provided information on what we know about homelessness. Of the 1,200 families experiencing homelessness, the overwhelming majority are in Dublin. While the number of homeless families outside Dublin has increased recently, the increase in the number of homeless families in Dublin has slowed down. This has been driven by a number of factors which we can discuss if members wish to explore them.

I understand, however, that the focus of the joint committee is to explore how homelessness is impacting on lone parents. The official figures and our experience shows that 65% of families in emergency accommodation are lone parent families. However, as we heard, lone parent families account for approximately one quarter of families in the general population. It is clear, therefore, that the problem of family homelessness is falling disproportionately on lone parents. Why is this the case and what is causing this? In our submission, we outline a little of what we know in general about family homelessness, which is important. We know that most families living in emergency accommodation had their last secure home in the private rented sector. As yet, we have seen virtually no families who were previously owner-occupiers, although we all live in fear of this happening.

As I have stated previously at meetings of Oireachtas committees, it must be acknowledged that this is not a phenomenon but demonstrates that the policies being implemented by successive Governments to prevent owner-occupiers entering homelessness have been successful and, therefore, should be continued. A similar concern should be extended to other groups because it is not an accident that families who were owner-occupiers have not ended up in homeless services, although some may yet do so.

There is a broad range of things driving those who had lived in the private rented sector out. These include rising rent levels and an inability to meet rising rents, either because rent supplement was not increased for a long period of time or because wages were too low, and the fact that working parents are being seen in emergency accommodation now illustrates this. A part of the picture that has really been growing over the last while, and we have raised this elsewhere and people will be familiar with it, is the increasing phenomenon of landlords selling up or using their accommodation for their own family.

There is also an identifiable group that is very much harder to put a proportion on. This is new family formations where people, usually a very young parent or parents with very young children, have been living in their family home and have attempted to set up an independent home but have failed to do so because of rental issues and so on. We are not going to put a percentage on this group because there has not been enough work done on it, but it is definitely there. There are solutions to it, which are different from the ones to the general housing situation, but which have not been adequately applied.

We are inevitably, and correctly, focused on the current temporary problem of economic homelessness. The old problem, the endemic problem, of homeless caused by social causes, mental health issues, domestic violence in the case of families, in particular, addiction issues and all those other causes, is still there. One of the serious things we need to guard against in the current crisis is that we do not turn our eye away from those continuing social problems because we are so concerned with this issue. If we do not address them, when we come to the end of the economic problem whenever that might be, and the sooner the better, we will find ourselves with a substantial number of individuals and families who have been homeless for very long periods of time and who have not had their underlying social issues addressed, because we have been looking elsewhere. As a civilised and wealth society we have to be capable of doing several things at once.

The points I made so far are true of all families. Why then are we finding such a high proportion of lone parent families being affected? The first and most obvious thing, and it has already been referred to by One Family, is that all the evidence shows that there is a higher risk of deprivation and poverty among lone parent families. Inevitably when all the factors which are driving homelessness are related to deprivation and poverty, they are going to fall more heavily on those families. We should not be surprised that is the case. Other factors which would appear indiscriminate such as landlords selling up, and where that is to do with the nature of the landlord rather than the nature of the tenant, seem to fall equally on lone parents and one-parent families. Before an individual family enters homeless services there is a period of time where it tries to deal with the crisis that has arisen. It is very easy to understand why, when faced with an eviction notice lasting a number of months, a two-parent family might find it easier to find alternative accommodation than a one-parent family. Even as a result of evictions, the flow into homelessness which is being seen is primarily impacting on lone parent families.

I have also mentioned new family formations. I will talk a bit more about domestic violence as a cause. We find in our data and in the front-line experiences of our staff that domestic violence is an immediate cause of homelessness for a significant number of families. Inevitably those families are going to emerge as one-parent families in emergency accommodation, but we are only seeing part of the picture. The primary response to that issue is through the Tusla-funded domestic violence services. It is not anybody's fault, but it should be noted that the way that the data are collected is a problem. The data Tusla-funded domestic violence services collect, and in these cases the families are just as homeless as the ones in the hotels, are not aggregated and we do not get an overall picture. As a result, we might have an underestimation of the extent to which domestic violence and family breakdown are causes of homelessness. That needs to be watched quite closely because it is an important issue. It is not unrelated to the economic issues.

There is an evident rise in family tensions and domestic violence during periods of economic tension. This in absolutely no way justifies it; it is simply an observation. They are not unrelated but we are not getting the full picture when we look just at the Department of Housing, Planning, Community and Local Government's statistics in that regard. The experience of emergency accommodation is tough for every family but it is additionally tough for lone parents. The sorts of issues of which people are particularly aware and which are very high on the agenda are access to education and parents needing to bring their children long distances to schools across the city. Obviously that is going to be more difficult if there is only one parent. Access to food also presents a difficulty, for example, where some emergency accommodation facilities have perfectly reasonable rules that children cannot be in the kitchen or left on their own in their room. Those two perfectly reasonable rules end up putting the lone parent into an impossible position. These are just examples. If the committee wants further examples Ms O'Reilly can provide more detail of the sorts of issues on the ground.

In this context, while there is a lot to complain about and much more needs to be done, it is really important to recognise what is being done. We specifically reference the actions such as action 1.5 in Rebuilding Ireland and the work of the Departments of Housing, Planning, Community and Local Government and Children and Youth Affairs with which we worked closely in supporting last years' pilot scheme for travel to school costs and the innovative scheme that makes sure all families in emergency accommodation can have the same access to early childhood education that other families have. To allow that same access, one needs to have specific rules because of the difficulties faced. It needs to be said that Tusla and the Department of Children and Youth Affairs are involved in that and they work closely with us to try to understand what those changes need to be and in putting them in place. That is a very positive thing.

We outlined some of the research we are doing in the area and I will sum up the sort of things that need to be done. This is a policy committee and obviously the members need to understand the problems but it also wants to change things for the better. Most of the things that need to be done for one-parent families who are homeless are the same things that need to be done with family homelessness - for everybody - and with lone-parent families in general. There is a limited amount of stuff that is specific to this group. It is being hit from both sides and it must be tackled at the roots. For prevention, we emphasise the reform of the private rental sector in order that it is a stable and secure place for people to live, the introduction of family mediation services to be piloted and explored and proposals to explore whether some of those newly formed families could actually go back to live where they were previously for a time, rather than living in emergency accommodation. There is also a need for more effective advice and information. During the year we ran - with the Department of Social Protection and using a Focus Ireland letterhead - a pilot programme where it sent out a letter to everybody on rent supplement in the Dublin 15 area. We are currently writing up the impact of that. It is very positive and proves that we can reach people who are not using the existing services. This is not a criticism of those services; it is just that people are not aware of them. It also proved that one can do something if one can get in early enough to turn that around. It targeted the vulnerable groups in that we knew where they were living in the private rented sector. Supporting people out of homelessness is around the two issues of building social housing much faster in communities where people want to live and prioritising the allocation of that to longer-term homeless families. One can build and take people from the top of the waiting list while leaving families in the homeless accommodation until their lives are completely blighted or one can see these families as the priority in delivering housing. At the moment we are not doing that and we can go into that in more detail. Ireland is not prioritising homeless families for social housing in the way we should be doing, and the previous Government did. Rent supplement rates and HAP rates remain crucial. We also believe there should be additional policing of the rules that were brought in regarding landlords, discrimination and what actually happens when a person is evicted. These are areas that should be explored more.

We know that one-parent families are more likely to be in homeless accommodation, but we do not know if they are more likely to stay there. In this crisis we need to concentrate more on how long families find themselves stuck in that situation and making sure certain groups or families will not be forgotten because so many new families are finding themselves homeless. The evidence suggests one-parent families are not more likely to remain in such accommodation because we are supporting a larger proportion of them, but we need much closer data to see where the problems are arising. Several families have told us the changes to the one-parent family payment and the seven year shift to the new transitional payment triggered their homelessness. We are not saying that is true but people believe it is. If I were in the Department of Social Protection, I would be spending a relatively small amount of money to find out if there is a glitch which is causing this problem in order to rectify it. We think that should be done.

In general, a great deal of money is spent on programmes for homeless persons and those living in poverty but very little is spent to find out which of them work. We should be directing a relatively small amount at finding out which policies are successful and which are failing in order that we can be more successful and do not leave it to organisations such as Focus Ireland and One Family to carry out that research.