Mr. Mike Allen:

I wish to concentrate on a few areas concerning prevention and perhaps a couple of other points. We are concentrating a lot on the area in which we have the highest level of direct experience, namely, family homelessness. Ours is the lead organisation in that area.

It is important to realise that almost all of the families entering homelessness services had their last homes in the private rental sector. Therefore, there is considerable concern about owner-occupiers and the problems they experience, including mortgage arrears. However, virtually none of these families has ended up in homelessness services. They may be homeless in more general senses in some cases but virtually none enters homelessness services. This should not be regarded as a reason for complacency. If the purpose of public policy in recent years was to prevent owner-occupiers in arrears from becoming homeless, it has been an outstanding success. We should leave that as it is, but it is worth noting some of the reasons. I am not saying there are still not considerable problems in this area owing to indebtedness and the stress on families, but their problem is not formal homelessness.

In the private rental sector, which is essentially from where the homeless families are coming, the two factors which are driving people out are the increase in rent levels and evictions of one sort or another. Unless we are able to tackle these two issues, we will see a continual increase in the number of families being pushed out of the private rental sector into homelessness services.

With regard to rent levels, there are two things one can do. The first involves doing something to moderate the increase in rent levels through rent certainty in some form or rent moderation legislation. We have always advocated that this be done, either in the short term or the longer term, by linking rents with the consumer price index. Some elements in the last Government tried to achieve this, but the Government used a different mechanism which, predictably, did not have the effect required. This was because there was not the political will right across government. Political will is crucial in how these matters are dealt with.

The other way of dealing with the issue is to increase the amount of money in the pockets of those who are being forced out. Virtually every one of the families who have become homeless were, on the last occasion on which they lived in private rented accommodation, in receipt of rent supplement.

As such, there is no escaping the fact that the inadequacy of rent supplement levels is a driving force for pushing families into homelessness. That said, we do not believe any of these is a simple solution. There is no simple answer to these things and there are unintended consequences for every action one might take. We argued several years ago that rent supplement should be increased in line with market rents but nothing was done. They have fallen so far behind now that to get families back into accommodation, we are regularly paying 60% to 70% above the rent supplement level to get housing assistance payments under the homeless HAP scheme because we were not willing to pay them an adequate level of rent supplement earlier on. There are ways to deal with rent supplement which go beyond the Threshold intervention. The metaphor I use is that it is as if the entire roof has blown off and the rain is pouring in but Threshold and the Department of Social Protection are running around asking if anyone is getting wet and just putting a bucket there. One can say Threshold's rent supplement measure is successful because it has prevented a number of people from becoming homeless but one must also look at the fact that every month since it was introduced, the number of families becoming homeless has continued to rise.

People are also losing their accommodation is through evictions. We very strongly argue for an improvement in tenants' rights, in particular in regard to the loophole whereby a tenancy can be ended if the landlord wants to sell the property. Legislation could be used to fix that up. A final area in that regard involves the policing of the rules that exist. Currently, if a family becomes homeless because the landlord says he is selling his property or his niece is moving in, the tenant goes to the local authority which assesses him or her as homeless. The tenant gives that as the reason but nobody from the local authority goes to the address and finds out if it is actually true. The committee members have passed all this legislation creating all this protection but nobody polices it. It is left to the family that has been made homeless which has other things on its minds to raise it as an issue. It is a simple measure to simply have a trigger for the legislation whereby somebody would go out, check and compile a report to say whether the property is being sold or is for let again.

As a result of the crisis we are in, there are a lot of things that need to be done here which are not very attractive. One of the proposals we put forward and which we draw to the attention of members is as follows. A number of families who lose their secure homes go to live with wider family for a period of time. After that breaks down due to overcrowding or, sometimes, because the local authority says the family cannot live there due to overcrowding, the family goes to homeless services. A proportion of those families could be supported to live in that broader family for a longer period. They call it "doubling up" in the State's homeless services. However, they would have to hold their position on the homeless list and they would have to have a case manager from the Focus Ireland team so that they did not lose out. We put that proposal forward a few weeks ago, albeit the political system has been busy. However, we think there is a significant if not a huge amount of strain that could be taken off families in the system by doing that.

There are three other areas I wish to mention which move away from the prevention area. The first is research and evaluation. Ireland spends an enormous and increasing amount of money on homeless services. It spends no money on evaluating the effectiveness of the measures it introduces. Focus Ireland spends a significant amount of the money we raise on evaluating our services but the State spends nothing. Recently, we had a brilliant talk from a Canadian researcher which set out that 10% of a project's money was spent on research. We are not saying 10% should be spent, or even that it should be 1%, but if the committee as part of its report recommended that 0.1% of the homelessness budget should be ring-fenced for research and evaluation to be carried out by the Housing Agency, it would begin to make a big difference in us being able to see what works and what does not.

The second issue of the three I wish to mention is about under-26s. I might have missed it in the discussion but the particular problems faced by under-26s who are unemployed and not care leavers have not been mentioned. They are on reduced rate social welfare payments. If they are not able to return to their families or do not have families to which to return and have lost their homes, they are undoubtedly going to remain homeless until they turn 27.

It is an outrageous situation and we are creating the rough sleepers of the future by doing that. A number of measures could be taken to deal with that.

We are very disappointed the Government has so far not decided to continue the enhanced allocations of social housing to homeless households. As members know, the former Minister, Deputy Kelly, introduced a protocol in which 50% of housing units in Dublin, and 30% elsewhere, went to households that were homeless or otherwise disadvantaged. That directive has ceased to operate and has not been continued, which closes off a very important exit from homelessness, given that Cathal Morgan said 1,000 households had moved out of homelessness as a result of that measure.

We know very well it is unpopular, and is particularly unpopular with public representatives. It is taking from people who are pretty poor and giving it to people who are extraordinarily poor. I accept that is not how one would want to run society but in the crisis we are in, if we do not reintroduce that regulation, we will see the numbers of families in homeless accommodation go beyond the number of hotel rooms we have in this city, as Mr. Balbirnie said. During this week, our housing intake team, which we run jointly with the Peter McVerry Trust, was working with a family after midnight and could not get them accommodation. Team members phoned 149 hotels in the Dublin area and in all the counties around Dublin before they finally found somewhere to put up that family. What a waste of their time, what a stress on the family and what an indication of how close to breaking point we are.