Ms Mary Hurley:

All of the speakers this morning, including Deputy Ó Broin, have referred to the importance of the data. The data are a tool for us and enable us to taper our services and provide the right supports to people in emergency accommodation. We are all agreed on that and work is under way in that regard. I hear some of the concerns the Deputy has expressed with regard to some of the NGOs and so on. We want to get to a point where we have enhanced data sets. As Ms Gleeson said earlier, we are working on new data sets and collecting new types of profile data to help us to taper our services. We are all agreed on that.

The Deputy referred to the recategorisation issue and emergency accommodation. As the numbers in homelessness began to rise significantly in the past 18 months, we have been trying to put in place high quality emergency accommodation solutions and that is where the family hub programme came in. When we started to work on emergency accommodation, we looked at the suite of accommodation and arrangements that were already in place. We also looked at the types of supports that were in place for people in emergency accommodation and at what was being classified as emergency accommodation. The Department is very clear that if someone is in a social housing home and has been for a long period, he or she is not at risk of homelessness. Such people are in own-door accommodation, for which licences are in place. In some of the instances where there was recategorisation, people were in HAP houses. It is fair to say that they are not in emergency accommodation and that is the view we took. We worked very closely with local authorities on the emergency accommodation issue. We did the survey, which members have before them, and it was on foot of that, when local authorities came back to the Department and confirmed the arrangements that were in place and the accommodation types, including independent living arrangements, that were in place that the recategorisation survey was undertaken.

On PASS, it is not correct to say that people in own-door accommodation are recorded on PASS. Those people are not on that system. People in own-door, independent units are certainly not recorded on PASS. In terms of section 10 and the funding of accommodation, that section also funds prevention measures so the fact that something is being funded through section 10 does not necessarily mean the person involved is in emergency accommodation. Indeed, many of the units where people were being counted as being in emergency accommodation had been funded under the Department's capital assistance scheme, CAS, or social housing investment programme, SHIP.

In terms of the work that was done, the objective in the Department is to focus our efforts on people in hubs, hotels and emergency accommodation. Individuals that are living in own-door accommodation at no risk of homelessness, or in social housing homes, HAP tenancies and licensed arrangements are not being counted as being in emergency accommodation now.