Professor Eoin O'Sullivan:

I want to talk briefly about what I call the dynamics of homelessness. The first slide is the one that most people are familiar with. It shows the number of people in emergency accommodation each month since April 2014. The most recent data are for November of 2020 and the December data will be published later today. These are the data that get most attention because they come out regularly each month.

I suggest that is not a particularly helpful set of data but rather that the next chart is much more informative. It tells us the number of people who have entered emergency accommodation for the first time since the beginning of 2014. We can see nearly 36,000 adults entered emergency accommodation in the country over that time, approximately half of those in Dublin and the other half outside of Dublin. The significant issue is that over 60% exited emergency accommodation to housing, either in Dublin or outside of Dublin. Another significant group exited through other means. In Dublin, we can see over that period we had nearly 11,000 exits to housing and another close to 5,000 exits due to people returning home or, in some cases, going to prison or hospital. That is why we are left with that figure of approximately 6,000 at any point in time. However, that is a bit misleading because it does not take into account the huge number of people who enter emergency accommodation and successfully exit it and stay out of homelessness. Sometimes the images we have of homelessness are of the rough sleeps, those in tents and in emergency accommodation. It neglects the fact that the vast majority of people who enter homelessness or emergency accommodation exit successfully, usually to housing.

The next slide shows the shift that has happened over recent years between the exiting to social housing tenancies, either by local authority tenancies or approved housing bodies, or social housing supports, usually in the form of the housing assistance payment. The balance has shifted increasingly towards people exiting via a housing assistance payment.

The next slide talks about what we have learnt and that we are doing well at present. First, this is for Dublin. Dublin runs a very good preventative scheme. They do not highlight it probably as well as they should. Every quarter, between 400 and 500 people are prevented from entering emergency accommodation, usually through the provision of the homeless housing assistance payment, HAP, which is the basic HAP and up to 50%. That has been very successful in preventing, as we can see in quarter 3, nearly 500 adults from entering emergency accommodation in the first place. We are doing fairly well on prevention.

Equally, the next two slides give the committee some information on the Threshold tenancy protection services funded by the DRHE and the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage. It shows the number of contacts, the number of tenancies that are protected and the very small number of households that end up in emergency accommodation following the intervention from the Threshold prevention scheme. We know a fair bit about what works in prevention and it is proving to be particularly successful at present. The following slide is the same data in another format.

We can also see, more generally, that since the Covid restrictions on termination of tenancies in the private rented sector - the biggest driver of numbers in emergency accommodation is people coming from the private rented sector - by April 2020 we had the lowest ever number of new entries into emergency accommodation because of that moratorium. The number increased over the year. They were declining again in November and, I suspect, again, in December and January, and will in February and March because of the moratorium on termination of tenancies. If we were discussing this issue this time last year, we would have been told that due to the constitutional position on private property, we cannot have a ban on terminations of tenancies in the private rented sector. We have, and we have seen the impact it has had on reducing the number of entries to homelessness.

The other issue I wanted to highlight for the committee is that we tend to get focused on Dublin and that the numbers, as Mr. Kenny pointed out, are rising in Dublin, particularly for singles. Dublin is becoming increasingly unique. Homelessness is decreasing in practically every other part of the country. In the south east, numbers have been declining since 2018.

In the west, the number of adults in emergency accommodation has been declining since the beginning of 2019, and in the midlands, that number has been also declining. Dublin is becoming increasingly unique. Whereas numbers there are increasing, outside of Dublin the numbers in emergency accommodation have been decreasing since early 2019 and, as such, it is not a Covid effect and something more long-term is going on there.

In my concluding remarks I make the point that ending homelessness is possible but it will not be achieved through charity, compassion or caring, sleep-outs, shelters or soup. It will be achieved through the large-scale provision of State-funded social housing tenancies, funded by local authorities and approved housing bodies with sustainable streams of funding and eliminating current disincentives to maintaining and retaining the stock.

I thank the members for their attention and I thank Ms Flynn for guiding us through the slides.