Aideen Hayden (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State to the House, and I welcome the legislation and the various amendments. As Members will know, the rent increases and the response thereto are issues I have raised on a number of occasions. Other Members present today have also shown great concern over these issues. It has been asked whether we got the whole cake. The answer is obviously that we did not. I would have liked to have seen rent increases linked to the consumer price index over the longer term because, ultimately, if legislation that gives tenants four years' security of tenure does not give them four years of rent certainty at the same time, their security of tenure is effectively being undermined.That being said, the main question remains: are the measures before us today meaningful, on the issue of rent in particular, and will they assist in a situation that nobody is trying to deny is extremely serious, particularly when it comes to children and homeless families?

I am not going to dwell on this, as I know we have a lot of work in front of us, but I will make a few comments. A total of 739 families actually exited homeless services in the Dublin region between January and September 2015. We are not dealing with the same cohort of people all of the time; we are dealing with people who enter and exit homeless services. Credit is due to the Dublin Regional Homeless Executive for the work it has done in this area. The tenancy protection service, operated by the four Dublin local authorities along with the Dublin Regional Homeless Executive and Threshold, the organisation I chair - prevented 1,346 families from falling into homelessness between January and October 2015. A number of interventions are being made and it is important to recognise them. The most important thing we can do in the current crisis is to prevent people from becoming homeless in the first instance. The tenancy protection service does that by doing exactly what Senator Zappone spoke about - by allowing the rent supplement to be increased to a point at which the family is able to remain in its accommodation, so that it does not become homeless in the first place.

Homelessness is a three-pronged situation. We must act to prevent families from becoming homeless. I agree that we will have to re-examine the issue of rent supplement, but it should only be done in a scenario in which we are doing something to limit the rate of rent increases. Otherwise, we are simply putting Government money into a bottomless pit. Once families become homeless, everything must be done to ensure that their stay in homeless services is as limited as possible. Measures have been announced recently as part of the cold weather initiative, which should be acknowledged. One measure is the extension of services, particularly from the children and family homeless action team run by Focus Ireland, into homeless accommodation and into hotels, where it can be difficult to operate outreach services. The number of staff allocated to that outreach measure has been increased to 25 project workers. There is co-ordination with Tusla and the HSE to ensure that there is on-the-ground protection for families, particularly those families with children who are in homeless services. Work is also being done on Garda liaison with homeless services. It is important to acknowledge that good work is happening in these areas among a significant number of organisations, including household names such as the Peter McVerry Trust and Focus Ireland, and at local authority level.

There is no immediate answer to this crisis. We will not have the level of supply that will be required to adequately tackle the housing issue for the next three years. We need to act now to ensure that what can be done will be done. I believe that this legislation goes a very long way to ensure that, especially in regulating rent increases.