Mr. Pat Dennigan:

Focus Ireland welcomes the opportunity to attend this meeting of the Joint Committee on Housing, Local Government and Heritage and to contribute to assessing progress on the committee's April 2021 report. To avoid taking up the time of the committee with a long description of the work that Focus Ireland does or the unique approach we take, we have included links to our most recent annual report and to our strategic plan in our submission.

Since the publication of the committee's report last year, the Government has published its Housing For All strategy. From our perspective, the most significant words in the strategy are its endorsement of the Lisbon declaration in the context of working with other EU countries to end homelessness by 2030. We are aware the strategy does not set out exactly how this objective is to be met but we do not consider this to be a criticism. Focus Ireland campaigned for such a commitment. We not only welcome it but we are also fully committed to working to achieve it and to working with Government and Opposition to identify what this will require.

We have argued that the next step should be to set out a series of milestones along the path to 2030 with detailed plans about how the first of these are to be achieved. Before Christmas we sent the committee a booklet of drawings made by children who, with their families, are homeless and whom we support. These drawings contained a clear message imploring the committee to ensure that ending child homelessness becomes one of our first milestones. We strongly recommend that the next report on homelessness from this committee should seek to identify the milestones to 2030 and how they are to be reached.

It might be helpful to see the pathway to 2030 in terms of three three-year stages. In doing so, we realise that very few people who are homeless now will be homeless in three years, and very few people homeless tonight will be homeless in three years. This points us towards measures which will prevent people from becoming homeless in the first place. Hearings for the committee’s previous report coincided with a time when the Covid-related moratorium on evictions was coming to an end. Professor Eoin O’Sullivan noted the significant impact that the termination of tenancies in the private rental sector had on homelessness, notably leading to the lowest ever numbers of new entries into emergency accommodation by April 2020. The report also noted, based on Focus Ireland research, that the termination of tenancies in the private rental sector was the biggest driver of numbers into emergency accommodation. Regrettably, the Government did not adopt the committee's recommendation 1 to extend the eviction embargo, resulting in a new wave of family homelessness.

In our view, there is little point in continuing to call for something the Government has so resolutely set itself against but the problem continues, forcing families into homelessness daily, so we must find other ways to deal with it. We agree with the Government that a balance needs to be struck between the rights of tenants and those of landlords. We believe that the Government has consistently got this balance wrong, introducing measures the do little to increase the security of tenants and that create anxiety and frustration among small landlords. We believe that a major effort is now required to ensure, at the very least, that landlords who plan to leave the market delay their decision by a number of years. We are happy to discuss these proposals further.

The committee's report identified the gap between the maximum HAP and the level of market rents as a major problem in recommendation 4. This gap has widened in the intervening months. HAP levels were last adjusted in 2016. Since then, the Residential Tenancies Board's rent index has risen by 30% from €1,060 to €1,397. HAP tenants attempt to close this gap from their already inadequate income from employment or social welfare. We want to draw the attention of the committee to the fact that tenants offered the social housing solution of HAP are treated entirely differently and much more harshly than tenants in actual social housing. This is resulting in entirely avoidable evictions and indebted returns to homelessness. It also further disaffects landlords. We have made proposals to tackle this, which we will be happy to discuss further.

The committee's report correctly identified the importance of Housing First in tackling homeless in its recommendation 3. At the end of last year, the Government published the second housing first implementation plan. We welcome this plan and the establishment of the new housing first office in the Housing Agency but believe the current approach to housing first is too narrow. We believe the achievements of Finland arise from ensuring that housing first principles inform the entire housing and homelessness system. We would be happy to discuss this area, and the need for one-bedroom units as outlined in recommendation 4.

We commend the committee's recommendation 8 on trauma-informed practice. Recent research commissioned by Focus Ireland and the Housing Agency, on domestic violence and homelessness called for staff in all relevant service sectors, including homelessness, domestic violence, and housing, regardless of their position or prior training, to be trained in basic trauma knowledge to ensure their interactions with survivors are trauma informed. This report is very relevant to the forthcoming strategy on gender-based violence. Focus Ireland advocates strongly for a trauma-informed approach to service provision. Trauma-informed care is part of our organisational strategy. We have an extensive training programme in trauma-informed practice for all our staff and we recently appointed a head of practice development to ensure this approach, along with a psychologically informed environment and the housing first principals, inform all our work.