Ms Caroline Timmons:

Good afternoon Chair, members of the committee and the staff of the secretariat. I thank the joint committee for inviting the Department to discuss the committee's interim report on homelessness and the recommendations made therein. I am accompanied by my colleague, Ms Rosemary Tobin, principal officer with responsibility for homelessness policy, funding and delivery, and Mr. Patrick O'Sullivan is online. He is principal officer with responsibility for Traveller accommodation. The Department works closely with DHRE and local authorities and I am pleased to see the local government sector in attendance. It also works closely with many of the NGOs doing great work in the area.

Resolving homelessness is one of the most important challenges facing the State. Housing for All is the Government's plan to meet our overall aim of ensuring everyone in the State has access to a home to purchase or rent at an affordable price, built to a high standard and in the right place, offering a high quality of life.

The plan enumerates more than 200 actions across four pathways which will collectively address housing issues, and all of those actions will contribute to creating a housing system that meets the needs of our people. The State has committed €20 billion in funding over the next five years to achieve those aims. The plan recognises that housing policy must address the needs of socially excluded members of society and that the issue of homelessness is one of the most pressing of our time. The State made an overarching commitment at European level through signing the Lisbon Declaration on Combatting Homelessness and has committed again in Housing for All to working towards ending homelessness by 2030. This will be done through a number of actions, including by increasing the overall supply of housing. The plan aims to deliver 300,000 homes between now and the end of 2030, including 90,000 social homes, 36,000 affordable homes and 18,000 cost rental homes. While all of the actions in the plan will have a bearing on this issue, particularly those on the supply of social housing, which is essential to addressing homelessness, in pathway 2 of the plan we clearly set out specific actions that will directly address homelessness. There are 17 recommendations in the interim report and I am happy to note that Housing for All includes actions which reflect many of the recommendations made by this committee in the interim report.

I will update the committee on some of the recent progress made and I am happy to discuss any of the recommendations in more detail during the meeting. The most recent monthly and quarterly homeless reports produced by the Department show that there was a decrease in the numbers accessing emergency accommodation in December 2021, down to 8,914, and the figure is 15% below the peak in October 2019. However, the trend in 2021 was an overall increase on the 2020 figures and this remains a serious concern for the Government and for my Department. In terms of recent progress, and this particularly relates to one of the interim report recommendations, the Housing First national implementation plan was published on 20 December 2021. This outlined our target to provide over 1,300 new supported social housing tenancies and to build on successes under this programme. We are also driving better co-ordination in policy measures and actions, and a new national homeless action committee has been established. All of the key Government Departments, agencies and stakeholders are involved. A key first task for the committee is homelessness prevention. It met again yesterday and will continue to meet monthly.

Work has begun on the development of a national youth homelessness strategy. Preparing this strategy will involve co-operation and co-ordination between our Department and our colleagues at the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth; Tusla, the Child and Family Agency; and local authorities. Greater cohesion between actions locally and policy nationally is also being advanced. New guidance was issued in December to local authorities on the preparation of local homelessness action plans. In tandem with the expansion of Housing First, Housing for All commits to expanding street outreach nationwide into urban areas, where rough sleeping is a concern. There are specific measures to support rough sleepers into sustainable accommodation. The Department of Health and the HSE, in Housing for All, have committed to ensuring that individual healthcare plans will be put in place for all homeless individuals who need them.

The Department has continued to invest in important services both to prevent homelessness and accelerate exits, including the HAP placefinder service, which is playing a vital role in keeping individuals out of homelessness, and in housing those who find themselves in emergency accommodation. We continue to fund Threshold’s tenancy protection service, which provides advice and support to individuals, couples and families living in private rented accommodation experiencing tenancy problems. It must be acknowledged that some families have been living in homelessness for lengthy periods and this is an area we need to focus on. Housing for All commits the Department to working with local authorities and NGOs to identify families experiencing long-term homelessness that have complex support needs. Those that do will be provided with enhanced tenancy sustainment supports to help them exit homelessness and maintain their homes. Additional supports are to be provided to families by Tusla.

The priority of the Department and local authorities continues to be to get people out of emergency accommodation. However, it remains critical that all emergency accommodation, whether NGO or private, operates to a high standard and actions are being taken to ensure this. A national quality standards framework, NQSF, has been put in place for services delivered by NGOs under contract to local authorities. The aim of the NQSF is to have it applied to all services for those experiencing homelessness. Taken together, these actions represent a significant and expanding level of interventions to support individuals experiencing or at risk of homelessness. My Department is committed to ending homelessness and we thank all of the organisations involved that are working hard to help those at risk of, or experiencing homelessness. We will continue to drive all of the actions in Housing for All, which will be essential if we are to make progress. I thank members for their time and attention and my colleagues and I are happy to answer any questions they may have.