Mr. Wayne Stanley:

Landlords selling up has been an issue for a number of years. If a tenant in situscheme had been brought in earlier it would certainly have prevented a number of families and individuals from ending up homeless. There is no question about that.

Regarding hidden homelessness and the total numbers, to be fair to the Department, they have never argued that the monthly figures that come out are anything other than a barometer of where we are in the number of people in emergency accommodation. That is how we have to view them. The question is not how many people, although we have spent time polling to try to get our head around that. The important questions are where the people are coming from and where the pressures are. Our understanding of hidden homelessness is the important point as opposed to necessarily the true scale of it. As we seek to understand that, we see it particularly in the area of youth homelessness. We know there are identifiable young people coming through systems that are not necessarily going to meet all of their needs, and they are going to struggle to find housing when they come out of it. If we are monitoring that and identifying those pathways into homelessness, we can actually put in place some of the preventive measures that will assist them. It will also give us a sense of the true scale at which we need to be providing social public housing to mitigate those risks of homelessness, over and above the very substantive crisis we have in the private rental market.