Damien English (Meath West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Chair for having us here. I welcome Ms Mary Hurley, Ms Ann Gill and Ms Rosemarie Tobin from my Department. With the permission of the Chair, and if it is okay with everybody, my officials would be happy to engage in questions and answers along with myself.

I thank the Chair and members for the opportunity to appear again before the committee to give an update on the Traveller accommodation expert review report and the progress made towards considering and implementing the recommendations contained within. This report has been published on my Department’s website. Addressing the issue of Traveller accommodation is a priority for me, for the Government and for my Department. I am very conscious that it is also a priority of members present. We have had a great deal of conversation and ongoing discussion on this subject over the past 12 months as we awaited this report. I thank members for their interest and efforts in this area. I look forward to having a positive working relationship in the months ahead as we implement the recommendations. I have had a chance to discuss these recommendations with some members. Perhaps the Department will also be able to engage on the subject of the recommendations and the proposed changes over the next month or two as we formalise and finalise our decisions. If members are happy to do so, we are happy to have these discussions in an informal setting in our Department as we finish our work.

The Housing (Traveller Accommodation) Act 1998 provides that local authorities have statutory responsibility for the assessment of the accommodation needs of Travellers and the preparation, adoption and implementation of multi-annual Traveller accommodation programmes in their areas. My Department’s role is to ensure that there are adequate structures and supports in place to assist the authorities in providing such accommodation, including a national framework of policy, legislation and funding.

The challenges encountered in the delivery of Traveller accommodation have been widely acknowledged by Traveller representatives, local authorities, Departments, the EU and the UN. I am conscious that this committee has also done significant work in this area. The completion of this review and the delivery of this report is a significant step in identifying the best ways to address these challenges.

I express my sincere thanks to Mr. David Joyce, Professor Michelle Norris, and Dr. Conor Norton for their participation in the Traveller accommodation expert group and acknowledge the time, expertise and commitment they dedicated to the review. I also thank them for delivering the subsequent report and recommendations and for their engagement with the committee and with the national Traveller accommodation consultative committee, NTACC. The group has done a lot of good work. Mr. David Joyce has moved on and could not attend for some of the presentations but his work was invaluable, as was that of Professor Norris and Dr. Norton.

A dedicated capital budget is in place to fund the delivery of Traveller-specific accommodation such as group housing and halting sites for Traveller families. The budget also provides funding for renovation and refurbishment work to improve the standard of existing accommodation. The budget available for Traveller-specific accommodation in 2019 is €13 million. This will be increased to €14.5 million for 2020. My priority is to ensure that full use is made of the increasing level of funding available for investment in Traveller accommodation. Although the increase for 2020 is not a lot in the context of what we need to spend over the coming years, it is still an additional €1.5 million. Until these recommendations are implemented and until we can prove that this money can be spent, it is difficult to argue for increased resources. My officials and I are prepared and happy to source the extra money required when we can prove that we can make progress in this regard and start spending money in the many areas in which it is needed. I hope members will understand that our aim is to achieve good planning and construction outcomes and to get resources drawn down and spent because there is a serious need for resources to be invested in Traveller-specific accommodation.

It is important to note that accommodation for Traveller households is provided across a range of housing options, including standard local authority housing, private housing assisted by local authority or voluntary bodies, and private rented accommodation, as well as Traveller-specific accommodation. Travellers may express a preference across the range of accommodation types at any stage when applying for social housing supports through the social housing needs assessment process. This process provides additional accommodation options to Traveller families to meet their culturally appropriate needs such as halting site bays and Traveller group housing. There is little doubt that delivery on capital programmes in recent years has been disappointing and I am determined to address the reasons for this and implement those solutions on which we can agree.

The 32 recommendations made by the expert group to accelerate the delivery of Traveller accommodation are comprehensive and wide ranging and include proposals aimed at addressing research deficiencies, including in how information is gathered and used; removing any potential delays and obstacles in the planning system with regard to delivery; increasing resources and delivery capacity; and strengthening governance arrangements. In the context of the 32 recommendations, my Department is now liaising with key stakeholders on issues arising. Both Ms Gill and Ms Tobin have been quite busy over recent months trying to engage with all the different stakeholders and staff in different sections of our own Department to try to get a sense of everyone's position so that we can build consensus on these recommendations and move them on as quickly as we possibly can.

It should be noted that the expert group’s report has also been shared with the NTACC and members of the committee are considering the report. Members of the NTACC have provided submissions to my Department, which are also being considered. Some of these are preliminary submissions. All further submissions from the NTACC and other interested parties including other Departments will be considered. We have asked that such submissions be made quite quickly. We do not need to wait too long. Groups have given their initial thoughts but we have asked them to go a little bit deeper. I am prepared to meet them if we need to tease through different bits and pieces in the weeks ahead.

My Department has been able to progress a small number of short-term recommendations. For example, a review has been concluded of the arrangements for disbursing funding for the provision and refurbishment of Traveller-specific accommodation and a new process is proposed which we aim to have in place by the start of next year. This comes under capacity recommendation 2. However, due to the number of stakeholders, the input required and the wide-ranging impacts of most of the recommendations in the report, my Department will set up a programme of projects to progress agreed recommendations.

In order to determine how each item will be progressed, we have adopted the following phased approach to the implementation, starting with phase 1, the information gathering phase. My Department is currently in this phase and, as stated, Ms Gill and Ms Tobin have done a fair bit of work on this. Stakeholders have been given the opportunity to provide their comments on the report and input has been requested from other Departments. So far, submissions have been received from: the County and City Management Association, CCMA; the Association of Irish Local Government, AILG; CENA, which is the Traveller approved housing body, AHB; Wexford County Council and; the Department of Justice and Equality. There is ongoing engagement with the planning team in the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government as well. There is a mix of views there so we hope to bring that to conclusion in the weeks ahead. A brief joint submission was also received from the three Traveller organisations represented on the NTACC, namely; the Irish Traveller Movement, ITM; Pavee Point and; the National Traveller Women’s Forum. NTWFM. These groups have indicated they will provide a more detailed joint submission shortly. Ms Gill said that has been requested for as soon as possible. The recommendations have been subdivided to allow my Department to form subject matter expert groups and to group by actions required. These working groups have been set up to carefully consider all submissions and determine how best to progress the recommendations. For example, a number of recommendations involve the review and amendment of the social housing needs assessment and I am conscious that matter was raised in this committee a few weeks ago.

Officials from the policy division and the Traveller accommodation support unit in the Department met to discuss this matter and will shortly be providing me with a submission on this and on how best to progress it. Separately, groups have been set up to consider the planning recommendations. The Department has grouped the first three planning recommendations together because they all involve changes to how a proposal for Traveller accommodation moves through the approval process or, in some cases, how such proposals have not moved through the approval process. A separate group has been set up to look at aligning the Traveller accommodation programmes, TAPs, with the local area development plans and seeing how best to manage and work that. As I said earlier, there are ongoing meetings with our planning team. They met again yesterday to go through this. I hope to sit down them as well next week to try to finalise some of their thoughts on this. We have to take on their advice but naturally they will be working with us to implement these changes throughout the local authority system as well.

Phase 2 is the pre-project phase. The Department will shortly begin work on the pre-project phase which will enable the project to move forward to the implementation phase. In this phase, a programme board will be set up and will have responsibility for agreeing which projects to take forward, the scope and timeframe of the projects and for overseeing the programme as the projects progress. The aim here to have one person in charge of the programme to drive it on and ensure that progress is being made because it is important to have somebody who is accountable, to manage it on a day-to-day basis and to have a mini board feeding into that decision-making process to make sure all the areas are covered because there are a lot of recommendations here. I will sit on the programme board, as will the NTACC and a senior official from my Department. In this phase, a programme manager will also be assigned. The programme manager will be responsible for centrally tracking the progress on all projects and reporting back to the programme board. I probably was not fair to it in my references to it in the Dáil. It is like a mini action plan. People might not always want to hear about more action plans but it is basically an effort to make sure we are tracking every decision we are making, that those decisions are not sitting on the shelf in some place but that we are implementing them and moving on. It is important someone is in charge of that job on a permanent basis. High-level project briefs will also be prepared in this phase, which my Department will then act on. This goes to show we are taking this seriously and we are bringing all the information together, with a view to moving projects along.

Phase 3 is the project initiation phase. Project teams will be formed, including the selection of project managers. The project initiation documents, including the detailed project plans, will be completed. This phase will take place early in 2020, hopefully January. The committee can be assured this Government is committed to accelerating and increasing the delivery of much-needed Traveller accommodation and the funding is in place to support this delivery. The recommendations in this report provide valuable guidance on how this may be achieved.

There are many recommendations in the report and I hope that we can work with the committee to agree on a consensus and bring them forward. In some of the submissions that have come in, there are different views on the recommendations and it is part of my job to try to work with the different stakeholders to get agreement and to get around the main recommendations so we can move forward because all of us agree we have to change how we are doing our business in this area. That is the aim of this report. By having the implementation board in place, every action and requirement will be assigned to somebody, we will track it and follow it and we will be able to answer to the committee on an ongoing basis, if that is okay with members. We will also keep other stakeholders who are interested updated. I thank the Chairman for his initial comments.