Ms Oonagh Buckley:

The use of emergency accommodation is sub-optimal. It is worse than direct provision. For all naysaying about direct provision, it allows us to provide public services in a more co-ordinated way to a group of people in a group setting. These are people who tend to have high levels of needs because of some of the circumstances from which they have come. The use of emergency accommodation is not where we want to be and we need to move away from that. As the use of emergency accommodation has become a more regular feature of the system, we have moved to improve our governance arrangements around it. I want to highlight that in the circumstances where we are under an obligation to provide a bed or a roof over the head of every person who presents, and we have no control over the demand, we struggle a great deal to keep ahead or abreast of the demand for bed places. That is something at which we have to work hard every day to keep on top of. We are happy that we are moving towards a better arrangement and better standards for direct provision more generally. However, for that to happen we need to increase the numbers of beds available to us in the system. We need to move people with status out of our direct provision centres and into mainstream accommodation.