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

I thank the Deputy for his question. He touched on a couple of issues and I will try to get to each of them briefly. He is absolutely right to focus on people who are sleeping on the street, on trying to get them into emergency accommodation and then onto a sustainable pathway. We now have the policies in place to do so. Since last year we have seen a dramatic reduction in the level of rough sleeping, 40%, which is very welcome, but there are still more than 100 people sleeping rough in Dublin, an issue on we continue to work. Housing First now has a national director. It also has a programme throughout the country. In one of the reports which, again, was published yesterday we see a 90% retention rate, which is very welcome.

The third housing summit will be held shortly, in the first week of July. I will be speaking to local authorities, specifically about affordability and the crisis of homelessness we continue to face. I will be speaking about the reports, their recommendations and how to implement them. I will have a further engagement today with the Joint Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government on the recommendations and how they should be brought forward. The Deputy is right to state that on Monday the new person will be in place and ready to get to work in his local authority. That is good because they will be able to work on the hard and complex cases the Deputy's constituency is experiencing.

There is an uplift so far as the housing assistance payment scheme is concerned. There is a figure of 20% for the normal housing assistance payment scheme and 50% for the homeless housing assistance payment scheme. However, some local authorities are not using it. Where I find an example in some of the data of their not using the uplift, we can go back and insist on a local authority using this measure because we know that it works.

See this speech in context