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.

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.