Tag: Homelessness

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Residential Tenancies (Amendment) (No. 2) Bill 2012: Committee Stage; The Housing Crisis and Child Homelessness

[CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY]

Amendment No 53, Section 15:

An amendment to section 20 of the Principal Act to provide for the extension of the duration between rent reviews from 12 months to 24 months for a period of 4 years, after which the period will revert to 12 months.

***requirement on the part of the Landlord to justify the reasonableness of the rent increase***

While this amendment falls far short of the measures of rent certainty I would like to have seen introduced, for example rent increases that are in line with an external measurement like the Consumer Price Index suggested by Threshold, I absolutely welcome this amendment as a much needed and long overdue first.

The latest quarterly Daft Report was published today and shows that in the third quarter of 2015, rents rose nationwide by an average of 3.2%, which represents the largest 3 month jump in rents since 2007 while supply on the rental market, just 4,000 properties available to rent nationwide today and very few of which offer affordable family accommodation, at its tightest on record.

The current “monopolistic private rental market”, characterised by rapidly increasing rents and a complete dearth of housing supply is intrinsically linked to our spiralling homelessness and risk of homelessness crisis.

Minister, I have spoken on this issue on a number of occasions in the past. I only plan to speak on this grouping of amendments this afternoon.

I have a number of questions and I look forward to hearing your answers from the floor. I will also be happy to forward any of these questions to you in writing if they require time for further consideration.

In November 2014 homelessness agencies were reporting that 700 children were living in emergency accommodation. In twelve months, this figure has now grown to 1500. It is extremely likely that this number will continue to increase as:

  • supply continues to be constrained and there’s no indication of a step change in new supply, given the pipeline of sites that are development ready and with available finance ;
  • new homes recently announced (modular housing) will only serve to meet part of the back log;
  • the private rented sector is likely to remain attractive to those who can afford it, and those who cannot access homeownership- I.e. So called ‘young professionals.

Affordable family accommodation is therefore chronically under supplied.

Minister, do you have a figure for projected demand for emergency accommodation for families with children? What exactly are you planning for?

Setting aside numbers in emergency accommodation, research has shown that where homelessness among children increases, this is coupled with a rise in children living in unsuitable and/or overcrowded accommodation, sometimes sharing with other families, which parents view as preferable to presenting as homeless.

Minister, do you have an estimated figure for the number of children who are living in overcrowded accommodation? Has a study been done into this area of concern or is one planned?

I and many of the children’s rights organisations (such as ISPCC) following these issues, are deeply concerned at the immediate and the long term impacts for children who are placed in emergency accommodation.

Temporary accommodation (whether hostel , emergency or any other forms of temporary accommodation) can all adversely impact on children. In many cases the lack of stability and uncertainty is deeply worrying for children and this is reflected in anecdotal evidence from the ISPCC Childline service.

It affects children’s ability to play due to lack of space, and often quiet spaces to study are impossible to find. At its worst, lack of natural light and outdoor spaces are also likely to affect development. Children report being extremely stressed, and often hide this stress and worry from their parents, who are also often struggling.

Emergency hotel accommodation is the most concerning type of accommodation for homeless children. It should only be used in exceptional circumstances. Right now, it is increasingly being used as ‘the norm’ because of a severe lack of purpose built temporary accommodation for families. I am genuinely concerned about child protection issues, safety issues, security issues s well as the range of developmental impacts as set out briefly above.

Minister, has TUSLA been involved in assessing the suitability of hotels /hostels that are housing families with children? If so, have they determined that some forms of accommodation are unsuitable? Who determines whether there may be child protection risks?

Are individuals working in hotels where homeless children are placed Garda vetted? If not, why not? I appreciate Minister that hotel staff are not normally vetted but the placing of children in hotels as a formal State intervention to the homelessness crisis changes the said hotel’s official usage. The children are living there, playing there, growing up there. On this basis, they could be a place of interest to predators. It is absolutely essential that urgent steps are taken to ensure all children in emergency accommodation are safe.

In other jurisdictions, with similar homelessness levels, emergency accommodation is used as an exception and then for no more than six weeks. How many children have lived in emergency accommodation for more than six weeks and Minister do you agree that this is unacceptable?

Are wraparound services available for all families in emergency accommodation, and what steps are being taken to work with families to help them secure and keep a tenancy elsewhere?

Minister have officials from your department been assigned to inspect emergency accommodation and its suitability for children on an ongoing basis? For example, to assess the safety and security of shared and communal areas and the availability of safe spaces to play.

Have you made any requirements of providers of emergency accommodation to make the accommodation suitable places for children? Has TUSLA been involved in advising on suitability?

Finally, I have a few questions concerning the new modular housing project for Dublin:

  • Will the design of modular housing reflect the fact that it is to be purpose built accommodation for homeless families?
  • Will the design meet the needs of children, and will there be sufficient space for children to play?
  • Will TUSLA and other organisations be consulted on the design of this accommodation, and if so, when?
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Private Members Motion: One Parent Families

I welcome the Tánaiste. It is with pride that I second the motion. The result of inadequate income for many one-parent families is food poverty, fuel poverty, over-indebtedness, difficulty with education-related costs, cutting out extra-curricular activities and children’s hobbies, living in poor quality housing, risk of homelessness, and homelessness. The latest SILC data for 2013 revealed that in lone parent households, the at-risk-of-poverty rate was 31.7%, the deprivation rate was 63.2% and the consistent poverty rate was 23%.

The particular and distinct vulnerability of this group is further shown by the Society of St. Vincent de Paul which has confirmed that one-parent families constitute one of the major groups to which it provides services. The financial assistance the Society of St. Vincent de Paul provides is connected with their low and inadequate incomes, particularly those in receipt of one-parent family payment. The Society of St. Vincent de Paul has advised that despite incredibly careful budgeting, there simply is not enough money in the house, and they find they need a payment to buy food or meet the costs of school, energy and housing.

Parents who work part-time find that their pay is low and unlikely to rise significantly as they often have low educational levels because of the situation they are in. Child care is an issue in terms of cost of child care and the salaries for those working in child care because all too often jobs that are considered to be women’s work get lower rates of pay.

The Society of St. Vincent de Paul also supports both two and one-parent homeless families that are in emergency hotel accommodation, in the majority of cases because of the major shortage in social housing or having been pushed out of the unregulated monopolistic private rental sector where market rate far exceeds rent supplement caps and where the housing assistance payment is only available from selected housing authorities. That is an issue that differs around the country.

Society of St. Vincent de Paul volunteers report that their members are finding that the move from one-parent family payment to the jobseeker’s transition allowance is causing them considerable uncertainty and fear, particularly among those who have received the letter from the Department. This is something I found repeatedly as I talked to groups in preparation for this debate.

The proposed changes regarding the one-parent family payment have also caused considerable stress, upset and confusion with Doras Buí, a community-development organisation centre that provides high quality supports and services to one-parent families living in the Coolock area of Dublin. That organisation outlined some of its concerns. Obviously a major cause of concern is the provision of adequate, quality and affordable child care in that area. It claims that the provision of the after-school subvention scheme is not adequate. First, not all private child care providers have taken up this scheme and many parents are unable to find a provider to collect their child from their school. It is great to say that one has the scheme in one place and the child somewhere else, but how is the child supposed to get to the scheme? Second, the subsidised scheme only lasts for 52 weeks. What are parents to do after the first year of the scheme finishes? The Department has advised parents to contact their child care committee after this time.

Many parents have expressed concerns regarding their current working arrangements and qualifying conditions for jobseeker’s allowance. Some are working ten to 15 hours per week, broken down to two to three hours per day for five days, in order to fit around child care arrangements. While working these hours, they do not qualify for jobseeker’s allowance because they work for more than three days per week. Many parents and their employers are not in a position to increase working hours to at least 19 hours, which would allow parents to be eligible for FIS and the back to work dividend. Another example has been clearly illustrated by the Dunnes Stores workers who work 15 hours per week. We see the precarious position they have been put in. A person may be called in to work thinking they might have five hours, and organise child care on that basis, only to go in to find out they have one hour of work.

Due to the current housing crisis and the lack of social housing, many lone parents are in receipt of rent supplement. Under the conditions of rent allowance a recipient cannot work more than 30 hours per week, so we are moving up the scale. If they do, they lose their rent supplement, so parents are left with a choice between working full time and keeping their home.

While there are child care education and training support programmes available for parents who are studying a FETAC level 5 course to help towards the cost of further education, there is no such funding for parents who want to go to degree level. This is limiting their education choices, which in turn limits their ability to gain full-time well paid employment.

I will end by mentioning a lone parent involved in Doras Buí who asked me to share her story with the House. Her name is Leanne and she is a single mother of one. She says:

The new changes in the One Parent Family Payment will really affect me in a bad way. My son turns 7 years old on the 14th of July, so this will affect me immediately. My son has been diagnosed with ADHD and Oppositional Defiant Disorder and takes daily medication. I attend monthly and sometimes weekly appointments in the Mater CAMHS hospital. I am currently working part time and I face a drop of 70/80 euro a week, basically between 280/320 a month. This is a huge stress on a lone parent like me, trying to better myself for my son by getting out and working part time and this strain is unbelievable. I attend counselling over these stresses. I cannot work full time as I don’t have a minder for my child and with these changes I won’t be able to afford one any time soon.

This really illustrates how a number of factors that I have tried to demonstrate come together and compound this downward spiral at a time when we should be supporting and lifting up lone parents and giving them the opportunities we say we wish to give them. I cannot see the evidence of investment in child care and after-school care. There has been investment, but there are no guidelines, no clear structures and no regulations, so the reality is that when people try to access services, be they housing or employment, all these obstacles are in the way. We really need to tackle this issue to lift lone parents and their children out of poverty.

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Statements on Homelessness Wednesday 3 December 2014

PLEASE CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY

According to the Dublin Simon Community, the official count for rough sleepers last month was 168. This represents a 30% increase in numbers since Spring 2014 and double the number since November 2012.

This is a time of many sickening firsts and all-time highs:

  • Emergency accommodation now has over 1600 adults plus 680 children. That’s never happened before!
  • Of the 1600 adults in emergency accommodation, 39% are women. That’s never happened before!
  • Emergency accommodation is turning into long term accommodation with no viable options to transition onto. That’s never happened before.
  • Many have given up looking for emergency accommodation.
  • Others believe themselves to be safer on the streets than in emergency accommodation.
  • Individuals and families are being are evicted from private rental properties every day of the week, unable to meet rent increases in an unfettered market.

We have an Emergency on our hands and it is winter. A very cold winter.

The numbers are steadily increasing and we need to act. Really act. Not a knee-jerk panicky reaction following the tragic death of Jonathan Corry. A dedicated and sustained response that looks at the crisis holistically.

For it is not just a homelessness crisis. This is a housing crisis.

A housing crisis characterized by a shortage in the social housing sector and a serious lack of affordability in the private rental sector, exacerbated by an absence in rent regulation, a rent supplement scheme completely out of sync with actual rental prices and the absence of measures to prohibit landlords discriminating against tenants on rent supplement.

The unprecedented crisis in the social housing and private rental sectors is pushing non-typical candidates into risk of homelessness and homelessness itself, for example, there are as many as 150 families in emergency hotel accommodation, the majority of whom have been pushed out of the private rental sector by spiralling rents.

Aside from the massive cost to the State, this hotel  and B&B accommodation is completely inappropriate, hugely disruptive for families and children, who may have to move schools as a result, and potentially unsafe.

I call on Government to immediately family proof all forms of emergency accommodation and to coordinate with the Child and Family Agency and emergency accommodation staff concerning child protection.

The crisis is in turn putting unprecedented pressure on frontline services and pushing those more “typically” vulnerable to homelessness (those with addiction issues and mental health difficulties and in complex situations such as young people aging out of State care, victims of domestic violence leaving the home) it pushes them  further and further to the margins only to resurface to public and political attention when they die in their sleeping bag, sleeping rough on the door step of the National Parliament.

The recently published Private Residential Tenancy Board Consultant’s Report found that rent control would make the housing market worse.

Focus Ireland rejected this finding. It maintains that rent regulation is a crucial part of a suite of measures, including an increase in rent supplement to reflect the actual cost of rent and tax breaks for landlords to encourage them to rent their properties.

I would also subscribe to a measure of rent regulation against an index as in many European countries or in line with inflation.

There are many initiatives to be commended, however there are “buts” attached to nearly all of them. For example:

  • Housing 2020 and the recently announced Social Housing Strategy but realistically we are 1.5/2 years away from meaningful delivery.
  • The new rent increase protocol agreed with the Department of Social Protection for families at imminent risk of homelessness but it is only available in Dublin and what we really need is a level of flexibility throughout the system and at an earlier juncture.
  • The Housing Assistance Payment, which is receiving a positive response from Landlords in terms of there being a guarantee around rental payment but doesn’t actually prohibit landlords from refusing to accept tenants in receipt of financial support. Also, how are people to find suitable accommodation within the maximum rent limits?

Excellent recommendations have been made in these regards and more by Focus Ireland, Threshold,  Dublin Simon Community and Peter McVerry Trust. The solutions are there. They just need to be implemented.

In closing, I would like to briefly discuss something a number of colleagues in this House said yesterday concerning Jonathan Corry and the fact that he had been offered assistance and accommodation over the 30 years he had been homeless, which de declined to take up.

I sympathise deeply with Jonathan Corry’s family and friends following his death. I didn’t know him or anything about his mental health status but I think these examples of people failing to take up an intervention and seemly choosing to remain homeless needs to be viewed in light of the Dublin Simon’s recent statistics on mental health difficulties among their service users, whereby 71% were identified as having a mental health difficulty.

Of those identified with a mental health difficulty:

  • 63% of individuals have been diagnosed with depression.
  • 46% have been diagnosed with anxiety.
  • 11% have been diagnosed with schizophrenia.
  • 11% have been diagnosed with psychosis.

A very high proportion of people who are homeless have addiction issues.  Furthermore, a very high proportion of people who have a mental health difficulty also have an addiction issue.

I call on the Government to urgently implement the key recommendations from Mental Health Reform:

  • Fully staff homeless outreach mental health teams.
  • Ring fence local authority housing for people being discharged from psychiatric hospitals.
  • On-tap, in-house mental health expertise within homeless services. E.g. Merchants Quay Ireland has an in-house mental health nurse full time, to provide support to clients that other staff members have concerns about. There are anecdotal reports that this has reduced the number of people having to access mental health supports through A&E when in a crisis.
  • Establish a dual diagnosis services for people with a mental health and addiction/alcohol misuse problems.

We have the reports. We have the plans. We have the expertise, particularly in the NGO sector. What we need now is action. Sustained and dedicated.

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Making the Case For a Right to a Home: Joyce Loughnan

 story-kevinIt is over 75 years since the Irish people approved a new Constitution in 1937 with Bunreacht na hÉireann replacing the 1922 Constitution of the Irish Free State. The Constitution is of course a vital, living document which seeks to reflect the values at the heart of Irish society.

As we all know, societies develop and change over the years and it is important for a Constitution to reflect this. Indeed, over the past 75 years our Constitution has been amended a number of times by the people, to reflect historical and societal change. The current Programme for Government included a commitment to establish a Constitutional Convention and this work is underway.

This year already, the members have voted in favour of lowering the voting age to 16 and to amend the clause in the Constitution which emphasises the central role of women in the home. Some of the other key issues for the Convention to examine in the first stage of its review this year include: reform of the Dáil electoral system; giving Irish citizens abroad the right to vote in presidential elections and the provision for same-sex marriage.

 

EVERYONE HAS A RIGHT TO A PLACE THEY CAN CALL HOME

Focus Ireland has always believed in a rights based approach to tackling housing need. Our vision is that “Everyone has a right to a place that they can call home.” We work through our support services and housing programmes to help people to secure a home and to prevent many others from losing theirs in the first place.

Housing is a basic human right and Ireland should honour its international obligations that guarantee a right to housing and act to remove the inequalities in the Irish housing system. We believe that if a right to housing was enshrined in our Constitution, this would help to ensure a more effective response by the State in dealing with the issues of homelessness and housing need.

Unlike other EU countries, Ireland has no established right to housing or accommodation for its citizens. Indeed housing rights in Ireland are historically weak by way of comparison to our European neighbours. Homelessness on the other hand is perhaps the most extreme denial of housing rights in society. It is a phenomenon directly resulting from poverty and social exclusion.


Without a right to housing the extent, nature and experience of homelessness in society is deepened, exacerbated and prolonged. Focus Ireland believes that the absence of a right to housing in Irish society means that previous governments, officials and administrators have responded in a lesser way to the challenge of homelessness and housing need.

Focus Ireland has called for a legal right to housing for all citizens in need of a home and for this right to be enshrined in our Constitution many times over the years. This belief is supported by the public as a survey carried out for our charity found that a massive 80% of the public support a Constitutional right to housing for Irish Citizens.

 

 

CAMPAIGN FOR A RIGHT TO A HOME

Focus Ireland launched a fresh campaign last year calling for a Right to a Home which included writing to the Taoiseach and the Tánaiste on this matter. We believe it was a mistake by the government not to include the right to a home as one of the issues for the Convention to examine as part of its first phase of work.

The finding of our survey show the public wants action on this issue. However, we welcome the Taoiseach’s commitment to add further topics to the second stage of this process and strongly believe that the Right to a Home should be one of these issues.

There has been good work carried out across housing and homeless services for many years – yet Ireland is still failing to provide adequate housing for some of our most marginalised citizens. If we are to effectively tackle major problems in society it must be impossible to view housing as a stand-alone issue. Failure by the State to provide housing leads to people becoming homeless or remaining trapped in low standard, insecure accommodation. We have sadly seen this in recent years as the previous government failed to meet the agreed deadline to end long-term homelessness and the need to sleep rough by 2010.

However, there have been positive developments already this year as Minister Jan O’Sullivan has recently launched a new Homelessness Policy Statement which sets a new deadline of 2016 to end long-term homelessness. Focus Ireland fully supports this policy and will be working in partnership to implement it – but we also still firmly believe that a right to a home is required in our country.

We are still very much focused on working to secure the “Right to a Home” as one of these issues for the second phase of the Constitutional Review.

I hope readers of this piece will support this campaign as we look to continue it this year to keep this important issue on the agenda.

To find out more about the work of Focus Ireland and how you can support our work go to www.focusireland.ie