Colm Brophy (Dublin South West, Fine Gael)

My Department is taking action across all aspects of international protection accommodation to ensure we improve value for money, strengthen governance and compliance, and renegotiate contracts with providers. This forms part of the overall reform of the international protection system that is already working to speed up the processing of applications and move away from commercial provision to more State-owned accommodation. This reform will help to drive down costs. The Minister and I are absolutely committed to driving down the costs in this area.

My Department took over responsibility for international protection accommodation from 1 May last and has worked closely with the Office of the Comptroller and Auditor General on carrying out an extensive review of costs and processes within the international protection accommodation system. This was published last week as part of the Comptroller and Auditor General’s Report on the Accounts of the Public Services 2024. All recommendations in the report have been accepted and implemented by the Department, with one recommendation to be implemented in 2026.

The report examined overall processes and sampled 20 IPAS contracts. It acknowledges the extensive challenges posed to the State to source accommodation during what was an unprecedented period, namely from 2022 to 2024. During this period, over 45,000 additional international protection applicants arrived in Ireland. Prior to this, a typical three-year period would have seen close to 8,000 or 9,000. Today’s standards of pre-contract assessment and negotiation could not be applied to accommodation between 2022 and 2024, basically because of the pace at which people were arriving.

While applications this year have, thankfully, reduced, they remain high compared with pre-2022 norms. This has given sufficient space to put in place greater controls over the IPAS accommodation portfolio. We have put a range of updated and strengthened systems and procedures in place and these are already beginning to have a genuine impact.

IPAS has put improved processes in place for appraisal, validation, contracting and payments. A new rate-card pricing structure is being applied to all new or renewing contracts, which has resulted in savings of over €52 million across 104 contracts since May of this year.

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