Mr. Brian Harvey:

On HAP, homeless people told us that although it was affordable, it was not their home. They could be put out again quite quickly. They could not do anything to that home. If they were in a local authority home, in most cases having a good relationship with local authorities when they were tenants, they felt they could reasonably call it their home. Legally, they had no long-term rights to be in HAP accommodation. Generally a person in a local authority home will not be put out unless they are responsible for gravely serious anti-social behaviour. There is a strong sense of security in local authority accommodation which is not the case in the HAP system.

In respect of the local authority practices, the problem is that the local authorities tend to contest that these problems happen. There is no point of dialogue between homeless people or organisations working with the homeless and the local authorities to address, name and sort out these issues. We know of some homeless people who complained about the way they were treated and those complaints went nowhere. Many of these people were in a state of fear about the local authorities. We have recorded the processes here such as "come back when you are really homeless"; "go and self-accommodate yourself"; "sign in daily". In one extreme case, a woman in emergency accommodation was going into town every day from the airport, with two children in a buggy, to sign in in person and meet three members of staff: a garda, a person who then signed her in and a case worker. Each of them went through her file, even though it had not changed since the previous day. Then she walked back out to the airport and had to do the same thing again the next day. Others had a car and were driving from distant parts of the city to sign in in person. This causes intense stress to homeless people. We recorded instances of homeless people breaking down in tears in offices and of children wetting themselves. One more sympathetic staff member said "I'm tired of you breaking down in tears in my office, go home, don't come back to me again. You can sign in by phone instead." We do have mobile phones and text messaging so why are those systems not used? There is also a practice of taking homeless people off the housing list when they do not know about it. The local authority says it tried to contact the people but these people genuinely have no knowledge of such contact ever having happened. They took the view that if the Revenue Commissioners or the social welfare office were looking for them they would have found them.