Ms Mary Hayes:

I am attending in my capacity as director of the Dublin Region Homeless Executive, which falls under the aegis of Dublin City Council. We operate on behalf of the four Dublin local authorities. As the committee is aware, as of the end of April 2023, there were 1,263 families and 4,128 single adults accessing emergency accommodation in the Dublin region. Our focus or the pillars of DRHE's work are, as I have set out, prevention, progression out of homelessness and protection for people who are experiencing homeless. All of that is underpinned by our fourth pillar, which is governance.

I will run through the highlights of the report. We place a strong emphasis on prevention. To date this year, 234 families and 174 single adults and couples have been prevented from entering homelessness . That said, I have concerns. We have been heavily reliant in previous years on the creation of alternative tenancies through the homeless housing assistance payment, HAP, scheme. In the Dublin region, that is a deposit, two months’ rent in advance and up to 50% additional discretion for households at risk of or experiencing homelessness. I am concerned because there is a month-on-month fall both in prevention and exits from homelessness. Our ability to access the private rented market for both prevention and exits is quite hampered.

Social housing lettings are key for us. Local authorities are aware we have to do more prevention through social housing lettings. What that means for us is that in respect of every person who comes in the door at the moment who is at risk of homelessness, we asses his or her position on the list and whether there is any way we can find that person an offer so he or she does not have to come in and access emergency accommodation. Some of that is through promotion of choice based letting schemes, as members will be familiar with, in the Dublin region. I wish to take the opportunity to clarify that under Dublin City Council’s scheme of lettings, a policy was adopted that, in the case of an older person or anybody over the age of 70, we set aside the scheme and they are offered immediate accommodation. We use that as judiciously as we can if people are at that age or thereabouts.

We rely heavily on some of the services we fund, such as the NGO services next to me, for their high-quality advice, advocacy and mediation. That can be key for prevention. We do not want to fund services that are signposting how to get into homeless services; rather we want services that are focused on keeping people out. That is a key difference for us. It is not about just describing what homeless services are; prevention is about stopping someone coming in. We are lucky with some of our partners in terms of the quality of their work and the quality of the advice they give.

On exits, I have gone through a couple of graphs. Graphs are graphs. I just want to highlight the key important point, which is there is no great change to presentations in the Dublin region. Despite the numbers rising in homelessness, there is no great change in singles or families presenting. Looking at the monthly average going back over the years, we can expect roughly 160 singles per month. In quarter 1 of 2023, we had 164. We are broadly pretty much the same as we have been for the past couple of years. It is the exact same story with families. There is no great change. Particularly outside the Covid times but even including those, about 74 families per month are presenting to homeless services and that is what we are seeing at the moment. In quarter 1, we saw 68. Those figures are pretty consistent. We would normally expect to see around 70 families. Outside of moratoria time, we would normally expect to see anywhere in the region between 70 and 80 families per month presenting. Therefore, it is not presentations that are causing either the rise in family or single homelessness. In our mind, it is predominantly the fact we are not exiting at the same rate and that is the real concern. Options are not available for people to exit to, especially in the private rented sphere. That is a concern because it leads to an increase or a banking up of homelessness. That is essentially what those three graphs are describing. The only time we would have seen a halving of family homelessness, we had fewer presentations, but of far more relevance was that we had increased exits. That is what makes the difference. I will not labour the point because I am sure members are well familiar with it.

Over all categories of accommodation, we are dropping in exits, including HAP. All four Dublin local authorities are trying hard to increase our local authority and approved housing body, AHB, lettings. Some of that is to do with the fact that people who are in emergency accommodation have quite recent housing applications and that can hamper us. I have argued at this committee before how important it would be to have a scheme to have extra targets under long-term leasing or something that is an alternative to emergency accommodation. I understand, and I have said this before, people’s reluctance about long-term leasing, but anything is preferable, both in social and economic terms, to homelessness. To be fair, we have been supported in that with a targeted leasing scheme. However, unfortunately for Dublin City Council, there has not been a huge uptake in that.

Something that has been positive that we welcome is the tenantin situacquisitions. As members may know, that scheme was introduced in 2018 by Brendan Kenny in Dublin City Council.

We welcome the commitment of the Government and the Department to funding that for us. I have just given the Dublin City Council numbers. I have not done the entire region but the committee will see that in Dublin City Council, we have 164 sale agreed and 18 over the line. It is critically important to us in Dublin. We take it extremely seriously. We are very happy that we are on the brink of reaching what was given to us as a target. We will probably have done that by today. We very much welcome the fact we have been giving comfort and reassurance to the national homeless action team that we will be able to go beyond that 400 acquisition target.

Regarding the committee's report and being able to answer some of the key concerns expressed in 2021 and what has happened since then, if we were to outline it fundamentally, the idea was to get away from using emergency accommodation. We are clearly not in a position where that is possible just yet. Some of those forces are outside of the DRHE's control. We are certainly not there but we support anything that is housing led. One of the key issues was the quality of private emergency accommodation and the concern about what was considered poor value and poor service comparable with NGO-style accommodation. My colleagues and I work very hard ourselves and we have NGO teams going into the private emergency accommodation as well as the HSE, which has been a key partner to us since we were last before the committee in supporting us in the work we do.

A key area of focus is training, and I have named the training areas in the submission. The committee had a specific interest the last time in trauma-informed care. That is being covered and members can see the instances. With trauma informed care, we are building up. We are starting with NGOs and then we are moving to the private emergency accommodation, PEA, providers. A serious amount of training has been done since we were last here. That is very much with the support of the HSE.

We have introduced key performance indicators, KPIs. We said we would work on balancing the national quality standards between private emergency accommodation and NGO accommodation. They started from two very different places and NGOs had a head start of several years. We have now equalised what we expect from a facility, whether an emergency accommodation facility or homeless service. That is comparable between the two services. If it is an NGO-run and owned service, we test the NGO. We can do the full suite of services for the NGO. If it is a PEA-run facility, I do not want PEA providers doing care and case management. What I want is our NGO partners, HSE staff or local authority staff providing care and case management. They take the care and case management set of standards but the facilities standards are now the same in both PEAs and NGO services. To underscore that, we have an inspectorate, which Mr. Durkan would have tendered for maybe two years ago. The inspectorate looks at fire standards, building standards and food standards within all the accommodation. Those reports are put up on the website for anybody to see and we are rolling that out quarter by quarter.

There is also the development of in-reach and the development of a more collaborative and joined-up approach. We have five NGO services going into the private emergency accommodation now. We have the HSE and we have our own workers. We are really trying to make sure someone can feel there are a lot more wraparound supports, as the committee recommended back in 2021. It works best when we are working together, or certainly from our point of view. I would just underscore that. If the committee has any other questions on outstanding recommendations, I am happy to answer.