Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for the detail of his replies. Picking up on a few bits and pieces, I am not sure whether the CSO is the right agency to compile future housing reports. I have not made up my mind on the matter. If the Minister is of a mind to consider it and debating it with his officials, he should consider including in the figures, in a way that they can be separated out in order that the different categories are clear, the almost 100 adults and children in non-Department funded emergency accommodation in the city such as Morning Star and Regina Coeli. That is important. If the Department is moving towards the CSO reporting, including rough sleepers in the overall aggregate figure would be useful.

The position is similar in regard to Tusla domestic violence figures and step-down emergency accommodation residents. For example, Professor Eoin O'Sullivan, as Ms Hurley is aware as he sends her his detailed analysis of each quarterly report, compiles a graph which displays the figures in a bar chart showing section 10 funding, Tusla funding, non-funded emergency accommodation, etc. I recommend that to the Minister.

On HAP, I do not want the Minister to mistake our position for that of others. HAP has good and bad things and I have never called for it to be abolished. In fact, I have always argued that we need a rental subsidy. I agree with Deputy O'Dowd that the facility allowing HAP recipients to work is an improvement on rent supplement. When that was announced I welcomed it, as did Deputy Ellis. However, the difficulty is that the legislation was not designed as a temporary solution but, rather, to say that the housing needs of those using it had permanently been met. That was the intention of the legislation. I accept Deputy Eoghan Murphy was not the Minister at the time. However, because of the nature of the rental market, it may not be the case that those housing needs have permanently been met. Some HAP landlords may extend the lease every two years but others may not, which creates an instability.

The crucial point is that if one is on the housing waiting list of Dublin City Council for 11 years and the average waiting time for a council property is 12 or 13 years in one's area of choice and one moves on to HAP, the number of years before one will have a chance of getting a council house increases. That is the disincentive identified in this report and previously and that is why I wish to explain the system used by South Dublin County Council which I think fixes that core problem. A year ago, South Dublin County Council stated that a person who goes into HAP, whether from emergency accommodation or otherwise, is taken off the global housing list, as per the legislation, and placed on a HAP transfer list, as the circular requires, but the person's access to housing is through choice-based letting and the original years on the housing list remain intact, which means nobody who moves from the standard list onto the HAP transfer list is in any way disadvantaged. That system has been up and running for a year and my only concern is that the report of the inter-agency group did not look at it and ask the simple question as to whether it has fixed the problem in the South Dublin County Council area. The housing managers there introduced it because a year ago they were aware of the disincentive the Minister is now contemplating. They discussed it with councillors and found a solution which I understand from my constituency work has resolved that difficulty. I can now tell someone who comes into my constituency office to take a HAP place if he or she has been on the housing list for ten or 11 years because he or she will not have to wait any longer for a council house than would otherwise be the case. I urge the Minister to consider that system.

I am concerned by the language used in the inter-agency report where it states: "it also needs to be considered whether it is appropriate for the State to provide emergency accommodation to households who are unwilling to consider HAP". That is particularly concerning in the context of what I have just said. I think the Minister addressed this point earlier but I ask him to clarify it. I presume he is saying the matter has been considered but this is not going to happen. People were nervous about that statement when they saw it in newspaper reports this morning.

I am also concerned that the report of the Dublin Region Homeless Executive, DRHE, states: "It can be assumed that a significant percentage of the Non-EU individuals may not have entitlement to housing support." The Minister did not answer the earlier question on this issue. None of the reports, including the very detailed and good report of the DRHE, published last week, contain any evidence of the truth of that statement. Does such evidence exist?

I am not obsessing on homeless figures. In fact, we could have dealt with this six weeks ago if we had received the information. The problem is that information from county managers which is in the public domain stands in stark contrast to what the Minister tells us in regard to the reasons, the nature of the people removed and whether it was done by agreement or instruction. It is the job of the committee to scrutinise the decisions of the Minister. When Mr. Brendan Kenny tells us that the approximately 200 individuals who were removed from the list in April are still homeless, it causes an alarm bell to ring in my head. When the director of housing in Louth emails every councillor and Deputy in that local authority area to say the 100 people removed from his list were still homeless but the council was requested by the Minister's Department to remove them, that sets off alarm bells. I do not want to get into a row about it again today. However, in order to resolve this issue the Minister must bring that detailed information to the committee and either convince us that what he did was right or allow us to properly scrutinise it and decide if what he did was wrong and those families should be returned to the list. It is not members of the committee who are sowing confusion, but, rather, the Minister's failure to disclose the information which led him, his Department or someone else to have those families removed from the list. In my view, the Minister has added to that confusion today.