Minister for Housing Simon Coveney has re-iterated his assertion that all homeless families will be out of hotel accommodation by July 1st despite recent figures showing the number of such families has increased over the past six months.
Mr Coveney said on Sunday he was confident his department would reach its target of moving homeless families out of hotel accommodation within the next seven weeks as the government invests €25 million to create places for 500 families in what he described as “family transition units”.
“There’s a lot changing at the moment, and over the next six or seven weeks we will see a total move away from hotels and B&Bs into family transition hubs - some of these would previously have been hotels, training schools, boarding schools, very large B&Bs.”
Latest figures from the Dublin Region Homeless Executive indicated the number of families that have been homeless for two years or more in Dublin has doubled in less than six months. The data also showed the numbers homeless for 18-24 months more than trebled between September 2016 and the end of February this year, while the figures for March showed there were 1,069 families – including 2,134 children – homeless in Dublin.
But Mr Coveney was defiant and said he was putting a lot of people in his department and various agencies under pressure to deliver on the July 1 st deadline. Some of the project teams were working 24 hours a day to deliver the number of accommodation units for families on time, he said.
“My approach to politics is always to set really ambitious targets and to go after them – if we hadn’t set that target, I don’t think we would have anything like the intense activity that’s going on at the moment – but yes, we are hopeful we can still get that done,” he said.
In addition to moving 500 families into family transition hubs, other families would be moving into Housing Assistance Tenancies and some will be moving into 68 special rapid builds, which will be completed in time for the July 1st deadline, he said.
Family-friendly units
Mr Coveney added that his department officials had been working with organisations such as Barnardo’s to make family-transition units as family-friendly as possible through the provision of activities such as homework clubs and proper dining facilities.
Mr Coveney conceded that more families were entering into homelessness, and while his preference would be not to have family transition hubs, such spaces at least provide safe and well-resourced facilities that are specifically designed to cater for families.
Meanwhile, the Opposition has criticised the Minister's spending "bluster" on homelessness. Fianna Fáil spokesman on housing, Barry Cowen, said capital budget figures from the Department of Housing showed we are still at "only two thirds of the 2004-2009 investment, at a time when the number of people seeking social housing has never been greater.
“In 2016, the Government tells us that it spent €316 million on social housing. Taken in isolation; it looks like a sizable investment. However, when compared to the €828 million spent by the State in 2009, the real story emerges,” he said.
Sinn Féin housing spokesman Eoin Ó Broin called on the Minister to revise downwards the Department of Housing's "new home" figures.
Mr Coveney had said 15,000 new homes were completed last year, but the figures had been challenged by academics and industry experts. The Central Statistics Office and Local Government Managers Association also had different figures. And the Housing Agency also disputed the figure, Mr Ó Broin said.
“They have estimated that the figure includes 3,000 reconnections, 1,500 unfinished estate units and 3,500 one-off houses,” he said. “This means that the actual number of new homes built and available for purchase in 2016 was just 7,000.”
