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

I thank the Deputy for his questions and for acknowledging the hard work that has happened over the last year or more. I talk a lot with the front-line staff and know that people can sometimes feel that nothing is happening. A huge amount of work is going on and it is important to acknowledge that, and that we need to do more, and always recognise that the work does not stop. Presentations continue but we are not going in circles. The hub programme and the use of housing assistance payment, HAP, show that. People spend less time in emergency accommodation if they are in a hub and get out of emergency accommodation quicker if they are going into a HAP tenancy. The vast majority of HAP tenancies have been successful. We are making progress. The Dublin authorities believe that we are beginning to see stabilisation of presentations in Dublin but one cannot tell that month to month, so there needs to be a longer reporting period. I hope that is the case. We will continue to put in solutions that we think are working, including new solutions that are necessary based on these reports.

The Deputy is right that the data in these reports are not detailed enough, even though much work was put into them. It is interesting that the recommendation was originally for quarterly reporting of our homeless numbers, approximately four years ago, when the Department and others were looking at this. It was decided to go with monthly reporting instead. The scale of the challenge was not as large or complex then because it did not have the different categories of people with different and specific needs. The amount of work that had to go into monthly reporting was not anticipated as being so great with regard to trying to understand the trends. Where a family presents as homeless, ideally, the first measure is preventative because we have caught them early enough and can find accommodation for them, either through floating HAP stock, through HAP, or through a social housing home. Until we get to that point, we want the hub to be the first response so that, when a family presents, no one goes anywhere near a hotel. That is what we want to get to and why we will have 400 more family hub spaces coming online in the next six to eight months. That is why we are going to move to a floating HAP stock. The idea is that, rather than seeing this movement in and out of hotels, as we saw in the course of last year, we are then just talking about the numbers in hotels reducing until they are gone. That is the aim of the policies, to get the best supports in place for people who are either at risk of homelessness or find themselves in emergency accommodation.

I am convinced that there is more that can be done with the transfer lists so that HAP can continue to work to meet people's housing needs and not shutting off the prospect of moving into a permanent social housing home. Inter-authority movement will be addressed because it needs to be addressed. That is clear from this report. There is no information on why people were refusing the offer of a permanent home in their area of choice. We need more information on that. We have to be very sensitive when we talk about these things, in trying not to paint everyone with the same brush. There are challenges there. We hear anecdotes about refusals. We all hear them from local authorities, as politicians. I have to work based on evidence, not anecdotes. With regard to the non-nationals figure, we made a call around Storm Emma for people to come into emergency accommodation because if they did not, they could potentially die due to the storm. As a result, people who were not sleeping rough in the streets or in emergency accommodation but were squatting or doing something else came into our emergency accommodation. As they came in, we realised that there was a greater problem with non-EU nationals than we had realised before. The difficulty with understanding why people are there, how they came to be there and what is the pathway is that there are issues around language, some of the staff on the front line not being trained in some of the justice issues that need to be addressed, and the reluctance of some, for whatever reason, to be as forthcoming as they might be. These are challenges that we will address with the Department of Justice and Equality to make sure that the best care is given, that people understand what their rights are, and how we get them into the appropriate pathway, out of emergency accommodation, following those engagements that we have. Some of the people on the front line are maybe not trained to deal with the large number of presentations of non-EU nationals that we saw on the back of Storm Emma.