Eoghan Murphy (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

It is important to note the huge amount of work that has gone on in 2017 between my Department, local authorities, the Dublin Regional Homeless Executive and the NGO sector. As I stated in my previous reply, more than 1,200 families exited hotels and bed and breakfast accommodation in 2017. Of course it is still a huge challenge for Government and society, with 700 families still in hotels and bed and breakfast accommodation. That is why we have initiated the rapid hub development programme for the coming months, for 400 additional family hub spaces, and that is why we continue to roll out the HAP placefinder service and the use of homeless HAP to help accommodate the other families who are still in hotels and bed and breakfast accommodation. On the increase in our figures of people experiencing homelessness in January, the increase of individual adults was anticipated to a degree because we brought more permanent and emergency beds into the system. That brought rough sleepers off our streets and into services. They are then counted as being in emergency accommodation and, importantly, are getting all the care and support they need to help to get them into secure housing. We have now appointed a national director for Housing First and we hope to see great progress with that model over the coming year.

Are we making a dent? We are making progress. When one looks at the rate of increase over the previous years, we are making progress and it is beginning to stabilise with regard to families. If we continue to do the good work that was done in 2017, then we will see quite significant progress over the year. When I talk about the progress in 2017, when one looks at the target that we had for increasing our stock of social housing and general social housing supports, we exceeded all but one of our targets. We were only 8% off the one that we did not achieve. Some 2,200 social housing homes were built in 2017, an increase by a factor of three on 2016 and only 200 homes short of our target.

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