Mr. Mike Allen:

We have not had a formal response from either the Department or the Dublin Region Homeless Executive. We would welcome if the committee were to ask for a formal response. On a day-to-day basis our services would be talking about those issues with the Dublin Region Homeless Executive and elsewhere. A formal response from that quarter is probably less appropriate.

The self-accommodation issue continues to be an enormous problem. To be clear, what is involved in that is once a family has been assessed as homeless under the legislation by the local authority, the local authority believes that it fulfils its statutory obligation by saying "Go and find yourself somewhere to stay tonight and we will pay for it." We share the view expressed by Mr. Harvey that it is not a correct interpretation of the intention of the Oireachtas when it passed that legislation or of the people when they changed the Constitution to protect the rights of children. It is hard to get the number but there are more than 250 families who are still self-accommodating so the concentration in Rebuilding Ireland is whether they are in commercial hotels or in hubs and that is where all this debate has been, but we believe what is equally important is the question of the big difference between being in a commercial hotel and knowing one will be there for six months, and being in a commercial hotel and going to be out tomorrow night and having to look for another place.

There are more than 250 families who have no case manager working with them and they may be waiting for several months. They complained strongly in the course of the research that they were waiting for a case manager. There have been several occasions when the homeless executive has funded an additional cohort of case managers in Focus Ireland and we very much welcome and appreciate that expenditure. The case management ratio is about 20 families to one case worker who is skilled and has a degree in social care and other areas. What has happened is that every time an additional cohort of case managers has been recruited the total number of homeless families has gone up and therefore recreated a waiting list.

The waiting list for children is even greater. When a family becomes homeless its needs are assessed when it gets a case manager but our trained staff also assess whether there are particular needs for the children, not just a problem arising from the fact that the family is homeless, which is a problem in itself. We have a number of child support workers funded by the HSE and Tusla but there is a waiting list for that. In a situation of a family being homeless where it does not have a case manager and it has been assessed as having additional needs for a child there is a waiting list. The overall problem of homelessness is so large that people are beginning to have to stand back from it but within the reports certain key things have been identified which could make a substantial difference to the experience of families and children who are homeless and the likelihood of them moving out. We know from our own work that a family which has a case manager is four times more likely to move out of homelessness than a family which is left to its own devices. From every point of view it makes sense to invest in an adequate number of case managers.