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

Everything we do in housing policy, including every bit of money we spend, is having a very direct impact on the level of homelessness. We are preventing people from moving into emergency accommodation or helping them to move out of it. We are putting actual supports in place and supporting the building of more homes that people can live in or rent. We saw very big increases in the numbers of people entering emergency accommodation in 2016 and 2017. The Deputy is familiar with the figures for 2018, when we saw an increase that was nowhere near as big as the increases in 2016 and 2017. This shows that policies are working. If policies were not working and new homes were not being provided, the increase last year might have followed the trend in 2016 and 2017, when there were quite significant increases in the numbers of people moving into emergency accommodation. Every time a new person moves into emergency accommodation, it marks a step in the wrong direction. The fact that the large increases in 2016 and 2017 were not seen in 2018 shows that the underlying measures we have put in place to increase the social housing stock and the housing stock more generally, when taken with other measures such as the introduction of rent pressure zones and the recruitment of more prevention officers, are having a tangible impact. In more recent times the number of people entering emergency accommodation has been smaller than it might otherwise have been. In the past two months we have seen something interesting which will represent significant progress if it can be repeated as a trend for the rest of the year.

More families exited emergency accommodation than entered it in Dublin. If we can continue to have more families leaving than entering, we can start to drive the numbers down. More importantly, we can know we are succeeding in creating overall sustainable solutions to homelessness for people in emergency accommodation.

We need to keep looking at new measures. In the course of last year, we had to bring about a Housing First national plan and a dedicated national housing officer, which we have done. We had to allocate additional funding. We are doing that and will continue to do that this year, increasing spend on things like hubs. We also need to look at policy changes and the rent Bill will have a positive impact on the rental sector and prevent people entering emergency accommodation.

At the first housing summit in 2017, I set up an inter-agency group to work between Departments to ensure co-ordination in supporting people in emergency accommodation, whether supports for health or social protection, or supports for families that were not aware of their housing rights and were trapped in emergency accommodation. That work produced a very good report in June of last year and, since then, we have been working to its recommendations. The Taoiseach recently brought a memo to Cabinet outlining some of the proposals that are moving forward now in each of those spheres.

We do not rest on this. We continue to bring new policy interventions where we think they will help. We continue to increase funding where it will help. We continue to listen to the experts and our partners in the NGOs. We are spending taxpayers' money to provide solutions and will continue to work on this until we have helped people out of emergency accommodation. More than 5,000 people left emergency accommodation last year. That is huge but it is not enough. We need to do more.

The figures for families leaving emergency accommodation in the past two months are important. Can we continue to drive what we have seen over the past two months for the rest of this year? Can we continue what happened in 2018 into 2019? In 2018, there was a significant change in the size of the increase in numbers entering emergency accommodation. That had been a worrying trend through 2016 and 2017.