Eoghan Murphy (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will come back to the initial comments. I have no wish to labour the issue, but Deputy Ó Broin is absolutely right in that I have talked about international comparisons before in discussing homelessness. My responsibility as Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government is to ensure that we have an objective analysis of policy and that our policy is based on fact. For far too long in this country, policies were not evidence-based. We look to other jurisdictions to try to get a better understanding of what exactly they are experiencing and why. We want to know what they have done that has worked and not worked and what we can implement ourselves. Let us consider the number of children who are homeless in Scotland. It is double the amount that we have in this country. The number of rough sleepers in the United Kingdom is 20 times the number of rough sleepers in this country.

Deputy Ó Broin is right in a way. We should not get lost in the weeds talking about international comparisons. One family in emergency accommodation is one family too many.

Every time we see a rough sleeper on the street, our responsibility is to help him or her to find secure, sustainable accommodation. That is why we work with initiatives such as Housing First. The voluntary sector, with which we work and fund, tells us the best way to help the homeless is to get them into a home first and then give them wrap-around supports. That is why developed the hub programme. It is a first response but a much better response than a hotel. We knew we needed to do something for the families to ensure they had the right supports in place. We are now seeing a couple of things with the hubs. First, families feel much safer and happier in the them than in the hotels, which is very welcome. Also, families are moving very quickly from hubs into other forms of sustainable accommodation. We collect more accurate data than other countries, which is good, and we publish them monthly. That shows our commitment to making sure we are not trying to hide this, downplay it or minimise it. We believe we should focus on homelessness because we believe, as the Taoiseach said, it is a stain on our society.

There is evidence of policies working. I have stated the figures before. The number of families in hotels has decreased by 20% since the peak in March of this year. In August and September, we saw more families exiting emergency accommodation than entering. That is the first time that has happened in three years. There are about 2,500 people who would be homeless today if it were not for the great work done by the voluntary sector with local authorities in exiting people from homelessness and preventing people from falling into homelessness. While the rate of family homelessness is increasing nationally, as per the September figures, the rate actually halved in the three preceding months by comparison with the three months preceding those three months. It is important to recognise, not just for the taxpayer, who is concerned about how we are using our resources to help these people, but also for the volunteers and workers who are doing the work, that some of these policies are working. They are not working as quickly as I would like them to, however. For this reason, we had a housing summit to meet local authorities to determine what new initiatives we could introduce. Helping with prevention will be the Housing First national co-ordinator, whom we hope to announce and appoint next week, the exit co-ordinators, who represent an important preventive measure, some of the change management practices we will introduce in the Residential Tenancies Board, RTB, and other changes.

On LIHAF, the 2018 allocation is €70 million. The overall envelope for LIHAF is ring-fenced out to 2019 and 2020. It is after that period that LIHAF 2, involving the additional €50 million, will kick in. It will not be until 2019 and 2020 so it is not a question of LIHAF 2 coming in next year. I have a detailed database on each of the projects I have signed off on under LIHAF and the ones I am waiting to approve. The vast majority are already at design phase. We have an idea as to what might be called upon when we do a second call for LIHAF 2. All of the money will be drawn down and used, and it will open up thousands upon thousands of new homes.

With regard to HAP, the RTB and their data, we always deal with a number of different data sets. One thing we are having difficulty with in looking at completions is getting the most accurate data set. I do not dismiss the daft.iedata. It recognises a trend upwards. We see that also. One of the things I want to do with the RTB, which I announced in September, was to move to a point where we could have annual registration of tenancies. That way we will get more thorough data for the RTB and even better data sets. The data we do have from the RTB for the first two quarters of the year show the rent inflation in the rent pressure zones is below 4%, which is more than half the rate in 2016. That is reliable information and it is welcome.

The additional €25 million for the affordability schemes, which will work on top of what we are doing in LIHAF, is new money. It will be allocated over 2018 and 2019. In the course of the next two or three weeks, we will finalise how the criteria for accessing the scheme will work. This will be done in conjunction with the housing bodies and local authorities. I hope to make an announcement on that but it will not delay any work in terms of getting the houses built.

I will ask the Minister of State, Deputy English, to answer the question with regard to Traveller accommodation.

When we consider our voids programme, we note voids can be an easy win because they are vacant local authority stock. What we have been trying to do is ramp up a programme of void conversions as much as possible and move to a programme of maintenance to prevent homes from becoming voids and give a quicker turnaround time. We have asked the local authorities to advise us on their numbers of outstanding voids and derelict units. We are going to fund about 1,400 of those this year, which probably means that, in later years as we look at the programme, there may be fewer voids as a result. It is cheaper to get a void back into use and we can do it more quickly, so we want to target as many of those as possible in a given year. Hence, there is a ramp-up for this year.

SHEP covers all our leasing, including mortgage to rent. That would explain the higher target in the table referenced. With regard to our build targets, 5,050 units are on track to be delivered for this year. That would include the build target we have, which is to have 2,000 built by local authorities and housing bodies this year. If there is some slack in one area, we will make up for it in another. I will be in a better position to talk about this in January. Things are looking promising in terms of the social housing targets we have for this year.