Mr. Mike Allen:

In the broadest possible general terms, Deputy Barry has correctly understood me. I have never seen figures that far out with regard to the Government's predictions for how many houses will be built and the 2023 figure. Perhaps I missed something. I was just drawing people's attention to the fact that this is where the Government says it is going to go and yet we know each year where the demand is. That was the first time we got some sort of Government indication of where that might shift. There are some really serious caveats about it. The first is whether we believe we will have 48,000 by 2023. Equally as important is the fact that a mismatch in the amount of housing supply and the people who need it does not necessarily turn into homelessness in the formal measured sense. It can turn up as doubling up, overcrowding or a range of things. That is quite divided by social class and resources. For example, if we were delivering 48,000 homes by 2023 and the majority of those were affordable and social housing, we would probably see a decline in homelessness far earlier but if the majority of that housing was market led and, therefore, at the top of the market, we would probably not see a turnaround in homelessness until significantly after that, so that mix of price, tenure and where will be crucial - not just in the numbers.

Regarding the question about own-door accommodation, my understanding is that the most significant change made to the measurement of homelessness by the Department was the fact that it stopped counting within those official figures families accommodated in housing units where people had their own key to the door. These people are no longer counted in those official homelessness figures. When the committee discussed this previously, I believe Deputy Barry asked witnesses from the Dublin Region Homeless Executive whether they considered such families to be homeless and they said "Yes". The Deputy asked witnesses from the Department whether they considered these families to be homeless and they said "No". They are not homeless as far as the figures are concerned but they are homeless - even in the own-door accommodation - in terms of getting support from people like us and being paid for, so it is a complicated area. Obviously, it changes the total number but if people are not impressed by the figure being 10,000, they will not be impressed by it being 11,000, so the more significant difficulty that raises is that it makes it much harder to understand what is happening. A family becomes homeless and if living in a hotel, is counted as homeless but if it is moved into own-door accommodation, it ceases to be counted as homeless but is not counted as having out of moved out of homelessness. So it becomes very hard to track what is happening and the direction in which things are going, which makes a significant difference if we want effective policy.

I have two points to make regarding the impact on children. When we talked to families that had moved out of homelessness and asked parents about the impact of homelessness on the children, the parents tended to say that it had not affected the younger children. They said it affected the older children but not the younger ones. I do not think we should take that at face value. I think it indicates a far more serious problem, in that the parents are not positioned to address the trauma that might have been felt by the younger children because they did not notice it. Rather than it being reassuring that the parents see it in that way, it is actually a greater cause for concern in terms of the long-term implications for those families. In the report, we mentioned that we are doing some work collectively with others on the trauma suffered by children and that we are happy to share that with the committee if it is interested.

In Scotland, there is a legal rather than a constitutional right to housing as it does not have a constitution so there is nowhere to put it. That has an impact. If we look at the impact of that, we can see the importance not just of the legal right but of political leadership, and I would argue, political consensus. In the early stages of that, there was a really transformative moment where all the political parties supported it and it was led very clearly. That drifted away. There is an attempt to re-establish that with a new strategy, which will be very welcome, but the sense that there was a cross-party, left-right and nationalist-unionist consensus that one of the things they were going to do right in Scotland involved housing and homelessness was really important. A very useful piece of PhD research written by a great researcher called Beth Watts compares attitudes and responses to homelessness in Scotland and Ireland - direct response in terms of the homeless service - which is well worth working at. The situation for families in Edinburgh is very different compared to that in Glasgow. The overarching position is the same but the way it plays out in the two major cities is very different and concerns what they did with their social housing stock. One city essentially gave all its social housing stock to approved housing bodies, no longer has control over it and is trying to get it back while the other city held on to its social housing. Responses in those cities are very different so there is a lot to be learned from what Scotland has done. As it does not have the same scale of family homelessness that we have, there are limitations. The scale we are seeing here is unique in Europe. It is similar to what one might see in the US but is not comparable to anything in Europe so to some extent, we must find our own solutions.