Ms Mary Hurley:

-----and in terms of funding as well. We are all on the same page on that issue. Voids are a really useful way of housing families.

I might just go back to what was mentioned about exiting families from emergency accommodation and the timeframe involved. The service providers operating the hubs have service level agreements in place. The target is to have families out of hubs after six months. I have already spoken about the cases involving particular families where that may not be possible. The Peter McVerry Trust operates a number of our hubs and we know from it that six months is the average time in which people are moved on from those hubs. Respond, which also runs a number of hubs, has a timeframe for moving people on of between six and seven months. People are, therefore, moving on. It just takes time to set them up and in the meantime they need some care and support in family hubs. They are then ready to move on. We try to move people on as quickly as we can.

We talk about exits, homelessness and trying to move people on. To get a picture of the inputs and outputs and people moving through the system, let us look at Dublin for the first five months of this year. We had 899 families present in Dublin between January and May. Some 462 of them were prevented from entering emergency accommodation and 404 families exited emergency accommodation. There were 1,644 associated dependents. What we are seeing is that for every family which presents, another is prevented from moving into that situation. One family exits from emergency accommodation each month while another one enters. It is very much a moving system. The Deputy is absolutely right when she states that delivery is the way to go. We delivered significant supports, more than 27,000, to families last year, of which 8,422 were through build, acquisition and leasing. This year we will deliver 10,000 supports. That means there will be 10,000 sets of keys for families at the end of this year. We are ramping up delivery and we know that is the way to go in helping people to exit from homelessness.