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

It is not that they may be doing so; they are doing so. Homeless HAP is a good example in that regard. It was originally for people who were homeless. Under the current system, a person is considered homeless if he or she is in emergency accommodation. I do not believe there is a statutory underpinning for that but the common practice has been that once a person is in emergency accommodation, he or she is officially deemed homeless and gets a set of supports. What happened with homeless HAP was that individual local authorities, particularly from the period when homelessness began to accelerate, started to make their own decisions regarding the point at which people become eligible for homeless HAP. The Dublin local authorities decided to start extending homeless HAP to people who were not yet in emergency accommodation. Even then, there were differences. In my local authority, South Dublin County Council, those in HAP accommodation and four weeks out from a notice were offered homeless HAP. That was not done initially in the case of those in RAS accommodation, however, because the RAS legislation has a requirement on the local authority to rehouse a person at the point when they must leave the property. The council realised it could not get replacement RAS tenancies and it then started to provide homeless HAP.

As regards how it went from four weeks to eight weeks and then to 12 weeks, I do not know whether that is consistent with the other Dublin local authorities but there was increasing pressure, often from elected members, that there was no point giving people homeless HAP four weeks before the notice and, therefore, it stretched back to 12 weeks. That shows the use of homeless HAP as a preventative measure for those at risk of homelessness was an ad hocdevelopment. There is nothing wrong with that; it is officials and elected members doing the right thing.

However, homeless HAP does not exist outside Dublin, even though some people call it that. Outside Dublin, there is a discretionary HAP increase of up to 30%. That is on a range of grounds. That discretionary increase also exists in Dublin, separate to homeless HAP. Currently, there is no official homeless HAP for persons at risk of homelessness outside Dublin but local authorities apply it in that way. Having a statutory definition of "at risk" would be valuable.