Professor Michelle Norris:

No. These are just our own analyses of the data from the annual census of Travellers, which we already acknowledge is problematic. It is impossible to know definitively how many Travellers get into mainstream social housing because there is no ethnic identifier on the application for social housing. We base our estimates on other censuses and surveys of the population but we do not actually know the real figures. One of the recommendations in the report is that Travellers should have the opportunity to identify their ethnicity when applying for social housing. That would obviously be voluntary but that provision would be there and would allow us to monitor the numbers more closely. Those figures on success rates are from our own analysis of the data.