Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank all of our witnesses for the answers so far. In the short time allowed, perhaps Ms Timmons could come back to me on the HRC, the cold weather initiative and the metrics for the Housing First target. That would be useful.

I want to belabour the issue about the circular, because I believe it is important. I want to make two points. I have the circular here in front of me and there are three priority categories. The first is for one-bedroom units delivered on Housing First to meet the short supply in this category. The implication is that it would be a vacant property for a Housing First allocation. The second category is other properties that would allow families to exit homelessness, and the implication here is that it is a vacant property. The third category is specific housing required that is suitable for individuals with a disability and other particular priority needs. All of this is consistent with the Minister's call for housing from August two years ago, which was looking for a vacant properties. We have a particularly acute problem, which is written in the past couple of months. If one looks at the DRHE report, the longer December report shows a very significant fall back in exits for families last year than in the two previous years. Some of this is because there were fewer families in emergency accommodation, which is good, and some of it is a supply issue. There absolutely must be a fourth bullet point in that circular which is, where in the opinion of a local authority a HAP or a RAS tenant is at risk of homelessness because of a vacant possession notice to quit, then the local authority should be empowered to pursue an acquisition.

Here is the problem: if a person receives a three-month notice to quit, are we suggesting that we should send the family off for two months to look for an alternative housing assistance payments tenancy, and when they do not find it maybe then the council would start talking to the Department and the dead hand of the four-stage approval process for acquisitions, in terms of trying to get an acquisition through? We want to avoid the spiralling of family homelessness beyond the numbers we had in 2018. This one small measure would be very key. I fully agree with Deputy Higgins that it is not about allowing local authorities to purchase properties that are on the open market and vacant for buyers. They should not be touched. This would be a very specific cohort. I would urge the Minister to look at that. Last year in the South Dublin County Council area, we had a bizarre situation with 80 properties, nearly all of which were second-hand homes in private residential suburbs. The bulk of those occupying them had been HAP tenants and they were issued with notices to quit. HAP tenants were put out and the houses were put on the market. Who is now buying them? It is small-scale institutional investors who are now leasing them long-term back to the local authority. This is bad for first-time buyers and bad for the original HAP tenants who were evicted. This urgently needs to be looked at and particularly in light of the rising homelessness figures. I just wanted to make that point.