Mr. Mike Allen:

I thank the Chair and the committee for the invitation to address this important issue. Much of what we are going to be talking about involves the report from the Office of the Ombudsman for Children on family hubs. We welcome the report and think it is a substantive and wise contribution to the debate. It mixes the voices of the children experiencing homelessness with questions on policy, or the absence of it. It is important for the committee to remember that the report is looking at the very best of what we offer for families who are homeless. The family hubs are a specific outcome of policy. The vast majority of homeless families experience a much lower level of accommodation and support. We really have to keep our attention on that aspect of the situation. It brings us to a point where we must not be spending all of our time thinking about what is the best form of hub and emergency accommodation. This committee, more than any other, needs to be addressing the real answer to homelessness, which is getting an adequate supply of homes.

The discussion on the hubs, and the way in which the report from the Office of the Ombudsman for Children highlights the absence of policy behind it, emphasises something which has been evident all of the way through the homelessness crisis. Every stage of the way, these problems have been addressed by simply stating that one form of intervention is better than another. Let us take the case of someone lying on the side of the street with no food and no cover. It is better in that instance if someone comes along and gives that person some soup. Once that soup has been provided, it would be better again if somebody else then came along and gave that person a free sleeping bag. Once that person has the sleeping bag, it would in turn be better if he or she had some form of accommodation, even if that was a dormitory with ten other people, some of whom were on drugs. Each of those scenarios is, arguably, better than the other.

Similarly, having families living in single hotel rooms is unacceptable and hubs are better than that. Better than, however, is not a policy. If a voluntary organisation states that handing someone a sandwich is better than that person going hungry, that is fine. It is a voluntary activity and a humanitarian response. Quite reasonably, we expect "better than" that in respect of policy from the State and the way that it addresses this issue. Regarding hubs, we have to ask what is the analysis of the problem which has informed the proposal to put hubs in place. In what sense is a hub a response? How will we know if that policy works? There is a complete vacuum in that respect.

We have highlighted two issues in the report. What impact is a hub meant to have on the duration for which families are homeless? We all agree that we would like to live in a world where no family was homeless. We are, however, in the middle of a crisis and the type of question we need to ask includes asking how long we are willing to put up with certain families remaining homeless. The most recent figures published were from March this year. Those figures showed that 167 families were homeless for more than two years.

A number of questions arise. Is it policy that those families should be in hubs because they provide a better form of accommodation or is it policy that they should be in hotel rooms because of some other reason? Do we expect the families in hubs to move on more quickly? Alternatively, do we expect them to move on more slowly because they have more problems? These are not complicated questions. These are the basic questions that anybody addressing the issue of homelessness should have asked on day one. We do not know the answer. What are we doing about the fact that those families are homeless for so long? We know the utter destruction homelessness causes to the lives of the people in that family unit, which is protected in our Constitution, and especially to the children in that family, who are also protected by our Constitution. We have allowed homelessness to grow, however. It has been detailed in the reports year after year for some time now. What is our policy to address that, how do the hubs, and everything else we do, fit in with that policy?

We have also had an absolute concentration from Government, and elsewhere, just on the numbers. I acknowledge that we have played our part in that as well. Every time the homeless figures come out, and mostly they go upwards, the Government states that X numbers of families have moved out of homelessness. If we concentrate only on getting the maximum number of families out of homelessness every month, so that we can have a press release on that achievement, the inevitable result is that the families with the highest degree of social problems will become the ones that remain in that situation the longest. They are the families that it is the hardest to support sustainably out of homelessness. When we finally reach the end of this crisis and we have enough homes, we will then be in a situation where there will be hundreds, if not thousands, of families whose capacity to operate independently has been entirely undermined by years spent living in institutions.

Even aside from the housing, that is a problem we can address. It is shocking that there is an absolute absence of any Government policy to even acknowledge that as an issue or to state how it is to be addressed. It has to remain shocking and be as solvable as the whole problem. Similarly, Focus Ireland has been recognised for more than 30 years as having expertise in dealing with family homelessness. The details of what we have done are in the report so I will not go through all of it. We are, however, recognised by every local authority and by the Government as having that expertise. We have argued consistently that there needs to be a case manager and a child support worker for every family in need of such support.

The Dublin Region Homeless Executive, DRHE, is responding to that need in a way that may be positive. It is recruiting up to 25 case managers to be employed by the DRHE and to work directly with homeless families. Those case managers will be paid at a higher wage level than the DRHE is willing to pay us to employ staff to do the same thing. It is not explained anywhere, that I have seen, why this is a good shift to make. It has been the policy of Government and local authorities for the past ten years, at least, that specialised groups are better at delivering these services. That is why organisations such as Focus Ireland, as well the Peter McVerry Trust, the Simon communities, Depaul and others, has been subcontracted to work with homeless people. We have that expertise.

There is a very substantial shift, involving a budget of over €1 million, from doing that directly. I am not criticising it. Let us be absolutely clear, I am criticising that I have not seen a single piece of paper which explains why that is a better use of public money and what benefits it will provide to the families, their children or to the homeless social taxation issue. It is yet another area where policy is being developed. We call it policy but there is not policy behind it.

The last point I will make since this is the housing committee is that concentration will be obviously on this issue of managing homelessness but it is housing that is the solution. There is a figure that surprised me in the fiscal report that came out yesterday. The Government is projecting that by 2023 there will be 48,000 housing completions. Completions will reach this sort of peak. I am sure the members of the committee will have views as to where the 48,000 figure came from and the realism of it - it came from the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government. If it is the Government's aspiration that we will reach 48,000 new completions in 2023, at that point the problem of homelessness will stop getting worse. We can assume that the problem of homelessness, that is, there are too few homes for the people who need them, will continue to get worse even on the Government's most optimistic statement. It will not stop getting worse until 2023. That is a very serious situation in terms of the pressure that is on homeless services, and particularly on homeless families, and the total absence of any coherent policy to deal with family homelessness is a distinct problem from the general one of homelessness.