Mr. Mike Allen:

To sum up, while this can be a very depressing subject, rightly so, it is important to remember that the number of homeless families is not static. Focus Ireland and other organisations are supporting families out of homelessness every day, and we supported more families out of homelessness last month than we had done in any previous month, and that has been building up over time. Since the allocations of the social housing directive were removed, the shift has been very much away from social housing, the proportion of social housing exits has fallen and the number in the private rented sector has increased. Our view is that we would be now seeing a real decline in family homelessness if we had both of those tools available to us.

In the last month, Focus Ireland supported some 45 families out of homelessness into secure housing. Half of those went to social housing, whether from approved housing bodies or local authorities, and the other half went to the private rented sector with the support of homeless HAP. One of the unremarked things about the rent certainty provision, and it is one of the positive elements in most respects, is that most proposals on rent certainty suggested that when a place becomes empty and a new tenant comes in, the landlords can just go back to the market price. They cannot do that under the current provision and that will help to keep overall rents in control, which is positive. However, it removes one of the things Ms O'Reilly was referring to, namely, under the old system, for families and households who were not seen as good tenants by landlords, we were buying them back into the market due to the fact homeless HAP can put a premium on them. It should not have to do that but it is exactly the same as we do in the labour market, where, if somebody is long-term unemployed, we give employers a subsidy to take them. In this way, we pay rents slightly above the going rate to get somebody out of homeless accommodation and back into rented accommodation. That is now closed off to us because of this measure. There may be other ways we will get around that but it is an unintended consequence of closing that off. If we could close that out, we might begin to see a significant decline in exits. That is a fear and something we need to address rather than an alarmist statement.

Deputy Bailey made a point about housing supply. All I would add is that when we do not have enough supply, there is a distributional issue as to who gets to carry the burden of this problem. At the moment we are quite clearly putting it on poor families, lone-parent families and the vulnerable - they are carrying the burden. I would warn that, given the new housing units and the approach in Rebuilding Ireland, as we have said before, there is a real fear that what is being done means a new parallel homeless service for families is being built up for the medium and long term. We do not think it is a good idea to build in special provisions for such families because it is transitional accommodation.

The Irish State abolished transitional accommodation for homeless families ten years ago by consensus. If we are moving back to thinking that people must make some sort of transition from homelessness back into a home, that is a serious step backwards. Everybody who has made a mistake on family homelessness has essentially put into systems which warehouse homeless families for long periods of time until we get the market right. Those families suffer, their children suffer and society suffers. That is one interpretation of the plan in Rebuilding Ireland. We have raised this with the Minister and the Department. There were not further discussions. There needs to be a specific sub-strategy on homeless families, including lone parent families, to elaborate the complexity of that issue. This is not directly the area of concern and is more about social protection, but it is really important we say that. Otherwise, in the future the Department of Social Protection and this committee will be dealing with the social legacies of our failure to deal with these problems at this point.