Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

On Monday of this week, I launched "What is the True Level of Homelessness?", a short report of which the Minister was highly critical before he departed the Chamber earlier. It is clear that he has not read the report, so I will summarise it for the Minister of State. A monthly report is produced by the Department of Housing, Heritage and Local Government and it reports the number of adults and children in emergency accommodation funded by that Department under section 10 of the Housing Acts. The most recent figure is 8,737 people, which includes 2,600 children.

However, the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth also funds emergency accommodation through Tusla for adults, predominantly women, and children fleeing domestic violence. Those figures are not published by the Department of Housing, Heritage and Local Government, but on any given night, according to Tusla, there are approximately 600 adults and children in that accommodation. Those people are also homeless, but are not counted in the report of the Department of Housing, Heritage and Local Government. In addition, a new situation has emerged in recent years. There are currently 1,020 adults and children who have secured their leave to remain and received international protection. They were formerly asylum seekers, but they cannot get out of direct provision because of the crisis in the rental sector. In fact, those people are eligible for homeless HAP through the local authorities. Clearly, they are also homeless, but they are not included in the Department's report. On any given night, there are approximately 100 men and women in two hostels in Dublin which are not funded by any Department and, therefore, not counted in official statistics. There are also between 90 and over 100 rough sleepers.

The point of producing my report was not to criticise the Department, but to state that the old methodology is out of date and there must be a new one. At least quarterly, if not monthly, there should be a report that details all the adults and children who are in emergency accommodation funded by Departments or rough sleeping. The Minister is wrong to say that these are false figures. They are from Government agencies and the parliamentary questions are in the back of the report. Why do we focus on figures? If one wishes to fix a problem, one must be able to quantify it. If we want to know the level of support that is required to get these adults and children out of homelessness, we must know how many of them are in emergency accommodation. These figures do not even include those who are sofa surfing or living in inadequate or inappropriate accommodation. Not only do I stand by the report, but I assume the Departments that gave us these figures will also stand over their figures. I urge the Minister of State, Deputy Noonan, who is a great deal more reasonable on these matters than some of his ministerial colleagues, to read the report and consider the data in it.

On the Bill, the sole purpose of putting forward this Bill is to put forward the issue of homelessness prevention and the need for a focus on defining people at risk of homelessness, and place a legal obligation on local authorities to put in place a homelessness prevention plan for those families. That should become Government policy. Of course the Government would draft this legislation better than us, if it chose to do so, because it has the experience of its civil servants and the Attorney General. I would happily throw this Bill in the bin if the Government said it would produce its own Bill to do the same thing. In fact, if the Government wishes to take all the credit for it, I do not mind. I care about preventing homelessness. Whatever the deficiencies in the Bill, and I was up-front earlier when I said there are a number of them, I am more than happy to work constructively with the officials, as we did under the previous Government, to produce good quality legislation.

The Minister of State rightly raised the issue of cost. I am acutely aware of the cost. However, it costs €100 per night to have a family in emergency accommodation. That is over €35,000 per year, and some families are spending their fourth year in emergency accommodation this year. The cost of the emergency response is always exponentially more expensive than the cost of prevention. If the Government were smart and said that for every person moved out of emergency accommodation for a set period of time, it would ring-fence the emergency funding and redirect it into prevention, it probably would not need any additional funding. It would simply recycle an emergency budget, which in and of itself would increasingly diminish. While it is important to raise the cost issue, it further emphasises the value of the central proposition we are making.

Ultimately, this Bill is about saving lives. That is not hyperbole, but a fact. This year there has been a significant increase, not just in Dublin but also in Galway, Cork and Waterford, in the number of people who died when they were either rough sleeping or engaged with homelessness services. They died from a range of causes. In some cases it was overdose, in others it was suicide and in some cases they were brutally murdered or there were other more complex situations. What has been happening this year is that the interaction of mental ill health, addiction and emergency accommodation is putting increasing numbers of people at risk. If we wish to talk about the costs, what greater cost is there than somebody at the age of 30 or 40 years dying because of inadequate provision of mental health, addiction and housing supports?

To conclude, I welcome the fact that the Government is not opposing the Bill. However, I hope it is not doing so to save itself the embarrassment of voting against a Bill which is focused on homelessness prevention. The test of the Government's commitment is how quickly we get this Bill to the housing committee, which is a matter for the committee, not the Government, and how willing the Government is to devote the time of its civil servants and the Attorney General to improve it. If we do that and we work collectively in the housing committee to make this the best Bill possible, we will see it have a positive impact on people's lives, ensuring that fewer people become homeless in the first place and that they either remain in the properties in which they lived previously or get alternative, affordable and appropriate accommodation, and therefore never have to spend a month, let alone a year or up to four years, in inappropriate emergency accommodation.

Of course, the solution to this is to build more homes. The capital budget for social and affordable housing is inadequate. It is more than it was last year, but it started at such a low base in 2016 that we must move towards doubling the capital investment in social and affordable homes to meet the social and affordable housing need and to tackle this crisis.

While the Minister's announcement earlier this week of 350 affordable cost rental units by the end of the year is welcome, the ESRI, the NESC and the Housing Agency are telling us that we need thousands of such units, not hundreds. Let us take those units and welcome them, but when I see the Government investing in thousands of affordable cost rental units and there is a substantial increase in social and affordable purchase homes then we will start to see the real commitment to tackle the housing crisis. I commend the Bill to the House.

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