Mr. Mike Allen:

I return to the changes legislation would make. We are not specifically saying putting it into housing legislation would change the allocation of housing, for instance. To a large extent, the local authorities do what these Houses tell them to do. When somebody who works for a local authority sits down and asks what his or her responsibilities are, he or she looks at the legislation and sees that the Houses of Oireachtas have not told him or her to look after the children in families and to have a particular perspective on that issue. If the Houses of the Oireachtas were to do so, a number of matters would stem from it, of which regulation would be the first.

As far as I am aware not a single local authority in the country has given its own staff any guidelines, recommendations or training whatsoever on how their services should respond to the fact that they now have parents coming in with children who are in trauma. There is no guidance, no training, nothing. That follows through into all the systems. I know there has been criticism in the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government and here of the Dublin Regional Homeless Executive and the Department because they cannot tell us how many children move out of homelessness but they can tell the number of adults. That is because all the systems are designed around adults, which in turn is because the legislation states that homelessness is a thing that happens to adults. It is not a magic wand and will not solve the problem but if children are not written into the legislation they will be forgotten because there is huge pressure on all the systems which to some extent will do what they are told and if children are ignored that will be lost, and that is what is happening.

The implications of the child-centred approach are quite frightening because they raise all sorts of serious questions but we cannot avoid them by not raising them. Ms Lambe may come in on that topic but first I will speak about the standards in the hubs and how our organisation sees them. Focus Ireland is not opposed to hubs. The question over the years has been whether we are for or against them. What we know from international experience is that putting people who are homeless into congregated or institutional settings for significant periods does them harm. It makes it harder for them to re-enter mainstream living. That is even more true of families. Any form of institutional living where 20 or, in some cases, 60 families are put in one place, even if it has wonderful facilities and so on, is not a good idea. It may be better than having them on the street but it is not a good idea. We want to avoid a discussion about the best form of hub. There are some very good ones and some very poor ones but we should be looking for another solution. The best practice in emergency accommodation is to not have a homeless problem and if we have a homeless problem the best practice is own-door accommodation. That raises real questions because as we see across Britain the local authorities have a number of social houses and instead of putting people into these as their homes they put them in as emergency accommodation. People say they are wasting a house and ask why it is not given to somebody but if some form of emergency accommodation is needed that is the best. There are real trade-offs in that.

I want to briefly address the numbers and the data. If there is one issue in discussing homelessness that is driving people to distraction it is a row about what the numbers are. The minute we started counting the numbers in 2014 they became a political instrument. The Opposition uses them to attack the Government and the Government uses them to say things are going well. That is the least important use of statistics. If someone listening says Focus Ireland is sometimes in that game too we put our hands up. We have used them to highlight how serious the problem is. We all need to recognise that using statistics in that way does not necessarily lead to good outcomes. The main reason for collecting statistics is to understand what is happening. The changes that the Government made in taking a particular group of families and saying if they are in own-door accommodation, if they have their own key to their door, even though they have been given the accommodation because they are homeless and are funded under section 10 in the Housing Act 1988, they are not homeless any more. There are certain things we could understand before about the flow into and out of homelessness that we cannot understand any more. We could see families come into and leave homelessness from the statistics. We cannot see them. The Minister of State, Deputy English, says he cannot predict how many families will be homeless next year but part of the reason for that is the way the figures are handled. A family that enters homelessness and goes into a hotel is still homeless, when it moves into own-door accommodation it stops being homeless, according to the figures, but it is not measured as leaving homelessness. It moves from own-door accommodation into its own home and then leaves homelessness but was not homeless beforehand.

It begins to be very torturous. Where there is own-door accommodation in Britain it is recognised as the better form of accommodation. British authorities recognise that it is different from the other form of accommodation but they count it. Progress through it can be tracked. If, for whatever reason, the Government wants to say that people living in own-door emergency accommodation are somehow in a different category from those in a hub or hotel, that is fine. However, we call on the Government to publish the data so that we can see the patterns and who is moving where. If organisations like our own collectively agree on how to report and use the data we have, we will be in a much stronger position to solve the problem, rather than using it as a brickbat to beat each other over the head with, which is unfortunately the situation at which we have arrived.