Mr. Mike Allen:

It is important and it comes up from time to time. There is a commitment in the programme for Government to create a passport, which would help people to transfer in the social housing realm, where it has been shown to be very helpful. It would make a big difference for people who are homeless. The idea that a person needs to be linked to a particular county when homeless is an ancient one and not particularly helpful. A much better approach would be what is in the best interests of the person. Ms Hayes referred to this earlier.

She spoke about a person who wanted to be in homeless accommodation but was told there was a reluctance to send the person back to where he or she had been because there was a Housing First option available there. It was clearly in that person's interest not to be in Dublin. Very often, the choice is not necessarily made on the basis of what is in the person's best interests.

The issue of private emergency accommodation is addressed in our submission. One of the important issues in the context of regional variation is that there are completely different patterns of provision of private emergency accommodation in each region. I ask the committee to consider the data we published on that. Most of the private emergency accommodation is for families. Many of the issues that have been raised here by the Mendicity Institution and so on do not apply to that family accommodation. It is private emergency accommodation for single people that is the particularly problematic area. I do not think that has ever gone out for a competitive tender between a voluntary organisation and a private organisation. The history of how private provision of accommodation for single persons came into Dublin is more complicated than that. It is about the standards the voluntary organisations that provide emergency accommodation wanted to provide and the amount of money that was available to deliver it. Focus Ireland does not provide emergency accommodation or run shelters. It is much more complicated in this case than simply a competition between people doing it on the cheap and people doing it well.