Housing minister expresses 'frustration' over failure to release homeless figures

MINISTER FOR HOUSING James Browne has expressed his frustration over his department’s failure to publish monthly homeless figures.

This week it emerged that the Department of Housing would not publish the figures due to ongoing industrial action which has left it without data needed to compile the report.

The department said it had not received returns from all nine regional lead authorities, which submit data on people accessing State-funded emergency homeless accommodation.

Browne had been called by Social Democrats housing spokesperson Rory Hearne to “urgently clarify” when the data for the month of September will be released.

Speaking on RTÉ Radio 1’s This Week programme, Browne maintained that the work-to-rule had disrupted the collection and finalisation of the data.

“It does require a certain amount of work that simply isn’t there”, he said.

“There is a frustration on my part that we can’t release those numbers as yet because while we put those numbers together, they come from all the different local authorities,” he added. 

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“Because people can go in and out of homelessness as well, we have to ensure that people aren’t being double counted, and also that everybody is being counted.” 

Browne said that despite these challenges in collating figures, the department would “have them released as soon as we can”. 

Asked whether he had any indication of the latest figures, Browne said, “I don’t know whether they’re going to go up or down.”

“We had four months there were the numbers had reduced in a number of months, and the overall increase was 10, which is 10 too many. But then last month we’ve seen a significant increase”, he said.

Browne explained that the shortage of available private rental properties, particularly in Dublin, was making it increasingly difficult to move families out of emergency accommodation through the HAP scheme.

He acknowledged the high cost of emergency accommodation and said the government was working to increase social housing delivery amid rising homelessness.

The latest available national figures, published on 25 September, relate to August.

Those figures showed a record 17,885 people in emergency accommodation, comprising 12,055 adults and 5,830 children.