Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein)
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24. To ask the Minister for Housing, Planning, and Local Government the councils that miscategorised persons in monthly homeless reports; the months on which persons were wrongly included; the number of persons in each of these months in this regard; when the persons were removed; the reason his Department did not catch this earlier; the adjusted figures for each month in which there was a miscategorisation; if the March 2018 figures contain a real increase or decrease on previous months based on the adjusted figures; and if he will continue to publish the figures on a monthly basis. [19984/18]

Darragh O'Brien (Dublin Fingal, Fianna Fail)
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25. To ask the Minister for Housing, Planning, and Local Government his plans for changes to the count mechanism for homeless numbers; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [20091/18]

Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein)
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Last Thursday, I accused the Minister of wrongly having families in emergency accommodation or who are homeless removed from the March homeless report. I spent much of Friday and early today talking to senior officials and front-line staff in local authorities and voluntary sector organisations and I am more convinced now than I was last week that the vast majority of those families are indeed homeless and still in emergency accommodation situations and they should be included in the figures. I hope the Minister can provide some clarity to justify the decision to remove 600 adults and children from the March homeless figures report.

Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael)
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I understand the Minister is taking Questions Nos. 24 and 25 together.

Eoghan Murphy (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael)
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That is correct. I propose to take Questions Nos. 24 and 25 together.

I thank the Deputies for their questions. My Department currently publishes data on a monthly basis on the number of homeless persons accommodated in emergency accommodation funded and overseen by housing authorities. These reports are based on data provided by housing authorities, produced through the Pathway Accommodation & Support System, or PASS as it is more commonly known. The reports are collated on a regional basis.

During the compilation of the March homeless report, in the course of examining data from local authorities, my Department established that a number of local authorities had miscategorised individuals accommodated in houses and apartments, owned or leased by the local authorities, including in some instances people renting in the private rented sector but in receipt of social housing supports, as being in emergency accommodation. As these issues have not yet been fully addressed, I am not in a position to provide a complete account of the extent of such practices. My Department is writing to local authorities as part of its continuing examination of the matter.

However, I can say that a total of 247 adults and 331 associated dependants, residing in houses and apartments, were categorised as being in emergency accommodation in the Dublin, south-west, mid-west, north-east and south-east regions. These categorisations were corrected prior to the publication of the March report. I flagged the issue that had arisen very clearly when publishing the March figures and was also clear that the figures would have been higher had the corrections I referred to not been made. We do not yet know the trend month on month, beyond certain indicators such as the rate of presentations of families in Dublin being down almost 50%. We also know that there are further miscategorisations in the system still to be worked out.

My priority as Minister is to ensure that families and individuals are moved from emergency accommodation, such as hostels, hotels and family hubs, into housing. I am satisfied that individuals and families who are being accommodated in publicly funded houses or apartments, whether it be social housing or homes leased from the private rented sector, should not be considered as living in emergency accommodation.

The issues which have emerged indicate clearly to me that we need improved reporting in this area in order to reflect accurately the numbers of households in emergency accommodation so that we can measure our progress and target our further policies and actions. My Department is examining the current reporting arrangements with a view to ensuring that the best possible data is available to support policy making. No decision has been taken on amending the existing arrangements at this stage.

Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein)
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That response from the Minister is astounding. He seems to be claiming on the one hand that local authority owned or leased properties cannot be considered emergency accommodation, yet 63 units in Tallaght Cross, in my constituency, owned by a local authority are emergency accommodation and the families in that accommodation are included in the March figures. Likewise, hubs are leased by local authorities and the families in those for six, 12, 18 or 24 months are in emergency accommodation.

In Louth, for example, 58 of the 100 families the Minister had removed from the March figures are in short-term, emergency type accommodation arrangements. They are in properties that have been leased by the local authority but they do not have tenancies and they are no different from being in a hotel or in a hub. Twenty-two families are transitioning into the housing assistance payment, HAP, scheme, but at the time the figures were submitted to the Minister's Department before he had them changed, they were not in receipt of HAP and were therefore being funded through emergency section 10 funding and should have been considered homeless.

I will grant the Minister this. There were 20 families in HAP tenancies with a section 10 emergency funding top-up. I do not believe those families should be in the homeless figures. They should be removed, but that means 80 of the 100 families the Minister had removed from the figures in Louth are homeless, are in emergency accommodation type situations and should be classified as such. I challenge the Minister again to correct the record. Otherwise, he is claiming that these families who are homeless are not, and that is an insult to them and their children.

Eoghan Murphy (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael)
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I thank the Deputies for their questions. What we are seeing, as this is emerging, is a mixed practice in each local authority as to both what they are counting but also some of the provisions they are putting in place to prevent people from going into emergency accommodation. At the Second Housing Summit at the beginning of year I told the local authorities to be creative in preventing families and individuals from having to access emergency accommodation. We know the tenuous nature of that with individuals going from day to day, night to night, not knowing where they will be living, and staying in hostels, hubs, hotels and emergency accommodation. I asked that they keep families and individuals out of emergency accommodation but to be creative with the solutions they put in place. What we have seen is that some families and individuals have been accommodated in local authority housing, some have been housed in the private rental sector with HAP support, and some have stayed in private rented accommodation which they were renting themselves but they were at risk of homelessness. The local authority provided supports and therefore they never entered into emergency accommodation and yet because it was section 10 funding, they were counted as being in emergency accommodation but they should not have been.

I was glad to hear Deputy Ó Broin recognise the fact that there has been a miscategorisation error here. We are trying to get to the bottom of the scale of this. We do not know exactly when it occurred. That is why we cannot measure, with any accuracy at the moment, the kind of increase we might have seen from February to March because we do not know exactly when those miscategorisations occurred. However, we will get that information and when I have it, I will publish it. We are talking about 247 adults and 331 dependants who have already been taken out of the figures, but I am aware there may be as many as 200 more. The Deputy might have heard me say in the region of 600 to 800. We are trying to work through that currently.

By the way, no one was removed by me from these figures. This was an agreement between my officials and the local authorities once we discovered that people were in homes with their own keys and front door, some for as long as two years. They were being counted as being in the same situation as someone who is in a hostel who has to go out and walk the streets every day. That is not case here. If we want to help people who are in emergency accommodation or people experiencing this crisis, we need to understand exactly who is there and the reason they are there. We are counting some people, including people from Tallaght Cross who have not been taken out of the numbers, but if some people are in a situation where they might have been in their own home with their own key and front door for two years, that is not emergency accommodation. If they are not at risk of going into emergency accommodation, they are not in emergency accommodation. They are in a home, and it may not be their forever home. In some instances, the home did become their HAP tenancy but they will not be going into emergency accommodation. They will be going into a home from a home.

Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein)
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The Minister is changing the definition of emergency accommodation. The families in Tallaght Cross are in emergency accommodation. They do not have a tenancy agreement and there are key workers, which the Minister's Department funds, to try to move them into permanent accommodation. The idea that because somebody is left languishing in emergency accommodation for two years the Minister is now saying that they are no longer in emergency accommodation is truly astounding.

All of this stands in marked contrast to the refusal of both the Minister and his predecessor to add into the homeless figures families and individuals who are in emergency accommodation but are not funded by the Minister's Department. There are two hostels in Dublin, for example, the Morning Star and the Regina Coeli, neither of which is funded by Government and both of which house people in hostel type accommodation. There are 66 people in the Morning Star Hostel and there are 40 rooms for women and children in Regina Coeli Hostel.

They are not counted in the Minister's figures. Adults and children in Tusla-funded domestic violence step-down and emergency accommodation are homeless but are not included in the Minister's figures. The 520 people, including 163 children, who, despite having leave to remain, are trapped into using direct provision as emergency accommodation because they are unable get adequate housing are not included in the Minister's figures.

When we highlighted all of this to the Minister previously, he would not change the figures because, God forbid, they would show an increase but now that the figures are going in the wrong direction, he is reclassifying the definition of "emergency accommodation" in a fundamental way. That is deeply dishonest and deeply insulting to these families. When the Minister finally publishes the data which I seem to have but which he, for some unknown reason, he does not, I think he will be forced into a climb-down.. A total of 80% of the families removed by the Minister from County Louth are homeless and should be included in those figures. If that trend goes across all of the 600, that is an astonishing number of families to have removed from these figures.

Eoghan Murphy (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael)
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I thank the Deputies for their follow-up questions. The tenants in Tallaght Cross are not at risk of being de-tenanted. Deputy Ó Broin is using the terms "temporary" and "precarious" but the tenants have been in those tenancies for a very long period and are at no risk of entering emergency accommodation. No decision has been made about people in Tallaght Cross. This is something we must address as a Dáil, a Government and a society. It is not fair on people in emergency accommodation who are experiencing that crisis in their lives to be described as being in the same situation as those who might be in the private rental sector, who have never gone into emergency accommodation and who are not at risk of having to do so. If we are to have the right supports and targets to achieve sustainable exits from emergency accommodation, we have to understand exactly who is there and why. I am not responsible for direct provision or women's refuges. These are different difficulties that are being experienced depending on where the person has come from in Irish life. What I am responsible for is getting people off the streets and into emergency accommodation and from emergency accommodation into homes. We need to understand exactly who those people are and why they are there to make we can provide those exits.

There was a report in the newspapers at the weekend that we were going to recategorise non-EU nationals who did not have permission to be here. Nobody is talking about recategorising non-EU nationals but we must face up to the fact that if they do not have tenancy rights, they will be trapped permanently in emergency accommodation. In such circumstances, what is the proper way to support those people? These are the things we must look at and have an honest and open debate with ourselves and the public about the challenges we face. If we reach the figure of 10,000, it tells us nothing that the figure of 9,600 does not already tell us, which is that we are in a crisis. We know we are in a crisis but I am concerned about how we best help people facing this crisis in their lives.

Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein)
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Not by fiddling figures.

Eoghan Murphy (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael)
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Why is Deputy Ó Broin so desperate to see the figures go up? If we go by Deputy Casey's definition, anyone in the private rental sector for two years might be included and counted as homeless. That does not make sense to me. We must be honest about the numbers. I was upfront about this when I discovered it. I have mentioned it previously. We are still working through this. We do not have the data Deputy Ó Broin claims to possess. The Deputy admitted to the miscategorisation there. He admitted that it is happening. I am trying to get to the bottom of it.