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

I thank the Deputy for the questions and I will try to answer them as best I can. No decision has been made on the homeless reporting. To be frank, I have not yet received the reports. There are two to be received, with one from the Dublin Regional Homeless Executive, DRHE, which I instigated in January, and one from the inter-agency group I set up in September after the first housing summit. Currently we work with monthly reporting and one of the problems is "miscategorisation". I will come to the second question in a moment. We are not quite sure how long this has been happening, when it first presented itself or the scale but it has meant the numbers have not necessarily been correct from month to month. It is also very resource-intensive for people working on the front line who are doing this type of reporting. I am not sure what it is telling us other than that numbers are increasing. I had found it difficult to get behind numbers. When we saw the increase in January I asked the DRHE to compile the report as I had not learned anything from December to January in terms of understanding trends. We needed a bigger picture to understand those trends. No decision has been made but I am awaiting those two reports. We have had a problem with monthly reporting and we have been debating it for the past month anyway since the miscategorisation was announced.

The Deputy had a second question relating to categorisation. He is not wrong in saying the debate on it, in some aspects, is a bit of a diversion from the real issue. I have said before that whether the number is 10,000 or 9,600, we have a crisis of homelessness. We know that. It is about what policy tools need to be changed, introduced or be driven harder in order to find sustainable solutions for each of those affected people and families. The work is ongoing on miscategorisation and we are trying to find out exactly where it has occurred. To date we know it has occurred in five local authorities and there is a possibility that it has happened in a sixth. We want to know when it occurred. It happened in February in one local authority and it was brought to our attention that this happened because there was a specific spike in one area. We want to know why it occurred. I said publicly that we think from initial conversations that it is about section 10 funding. At the beginning of the year at the first housing summit I indicated to local authorities that people should be prevented from going into emergency accommodation and that they should be creative if necessary. We think section 10 funding has been used, which is for emergency accommodation, and in some cases it was used to keep people in their private rental accommodation or put them into local authority owned or leased homes where they have stayed. They have gone nowhere near emergency accommodation but we think that is why they were counted like this. It is the piece of work happening currently.

When I have the two reports I must bring them to Cabinet first but I will then come hear to speak about them and their recommendations. I want to speak with the full facts. I did not have the full facts but I had to say what I did. I could not produce the March numbers and not tell the public what we discovered. I recognise that because we did not have the full facts, we now have questions we cannot yet answer. I want to have the full facts before having a full and thorough discussion on that and how to move forward together. This is not a political matter for anybody in this room but it is about helping. We can discuss the politics of how to deliver house building and whether we should use approved housing bodies, lease agreements or the percentage of houses that should come under Part V. These are the kinds of political questions we debate among each other before coming to policy decisions. When it comes to the crisis we have of people in emergency accommodation and people sleeping rough, we need to work together to get solutions. I know we are all on the same page in that regard. The Deputy is right to say we need to know the numbers as well. As we get the reports and figure out the problem, we will come with more detail. Not as many as 600 were taken from the March figures but it was not far off that number. The initial estimates are around 800 and it has not changed from the latest report from my officials.

Our engagement with non-governmental organisations in the voluntary sector is constant as they are partners organisations that we fund through taxpayers' money. I consult with those bodies on a regular basis. I will do that sometimes in a formal capacity as the head of a housing summit or it might be done informally, as I would meet the different chairs and chief executives, as well as some of the staff, from time to time. The inter-agency report is about co-ordinating Government resources and they are part of that despite being non-governmental organisations. There has been constant consultation. Recently we had a sit-down with the Taoiseach and the chief executives of the main bodies. It is constant.