Ms Sin?ad Lucey:

The issue of resources is interesting. Very few of the cases we deal with come down to an issue of resourcing. They often come down to an issue of attitude and perspective. Ms Heavey gave an example of a family sleeping in a car. It was a legal intervention that caused the shift. We dealt with a similar case where we had to go to the High Court last year. A family of six were sleeping in a car. The matter had to be brought to court before suddenly a house was procured. It often is not a question of resources.

Regarding a constitutional referendum, maybe this is not the year to be bringing it up, but the point about it is that it would put the focus on central government to look at the resourcing and set the resourcing at the appropriate level rather than the local authority having to allocate its resourcing if it is overstretched or whatever. It goes back to central government to decide what is adequate.

The Deputy has pointed out the complexity of issues that come up. It can often be very difficult to deal with standards in Traveller-specific accommodation because there simply are no standards in place. That is a huge legislative gap. There are quite elaborate standards for private housing and private landlords need to comply with those. There are certain standards for standard social housing. There are no standards for Traveller accommodation, and that is a significant gap.

Many Travellers living on halting sites simply have no recourse to the law because there is no standard they can enforce, unless it can be proved that there has been some kind of breach of constitutional rights, etc., but that is setting the bar at a very high level. It is not useful to local authorities to not know the standards. If they knew what the standards were, at least they could see whether they are on the right side or the wrong side of this, and then they could remedy it. However, they do not know and again they are grappling for resources.

As a final point, it has recently been reported there has been a full drawdown of the funding allocated for Traveller accommodation by the Department of housing and it is good to hear local authorities are drawing down that funding. There is a huge amount of opacity with that. We do not know how many new units of accommodation are being delivered and what that funding is going to. Is it building units of accommodation or going into estate management, or where is it going? That needs to be broken down so we are very clear where that spending goes and we can ascertain whether the public are getting value for money and whether Travellers are getting value for money out of that allocation of funding.