Government attacked over homeless

HOMELESS people spend up to a year-and-a-half in B&B accommodation, compared with just 20 days 10 years ago, Focus Ireland has claimed.

This shocking statistic clearly shows the Government strategy to tackle homelessness is failing, said Focus Ireland chief executive

Declan Jones.

“The reality is people are spending longer than every before homeless,” he declared at the launch of the organisation’s annual report. “We are now three years into a government strategy to tackle homelessness, yet the problem gets worse each day.”

Over the same period, the number of people on public housing waiting lists shot up from 39,000 to 48,413, an rise of almost 25%.

Mr Jones said the Government admitted last year it would not meet its housing commitments under the Programme for Prosperity and Fairness to provide 25,000 new house starts from 2000-2003.

Founder and life president of Focus Ireland Sr Stanislaus Kennedy said this disastrous situation did not happen by accident.

“Governments who don’t plan for housing provision do so in the full knowledge that this will result in chaos and misery, and that’s what we’ve got now,” she said.

Sr Stan said the Government must return to the social and progressive housing policies of the last century that ensured that up to one third of the housing stock was public housing. She also called for a doubling of public housing output each year for the next 10 years from the 5,000 achieved last year.

Meanwhile, the Government has announced plans to build apartments for the homeless by entering into public-private partnerships with developers who will build and operate the accommodation units. The apartments will be aimed at homeless families staying in B&Bs for long periods and single people on housing waiting lists who have little chance of securing local authority homes.

Housing and Urban Renewal minister Noel Ahern said there was evidence to suggest that the B&B scheme was being abused by a small number of individuals who had left housing waiting lists and claimed homelessness to speed things up.

He said, it was both unfair and misleading for organisations like Focus Ireland to say that Government policies were not working.

While there were 5,581 people classified as homeless, only about 100 were sleeping rough. Around 800 were availing of hostel accommodation while the remainder were in B&Bs and self-catering accommodation waiting for local authority housing.

“The quality and style and range of services to those people has hugely increased over the last couple of years,” he said.

Mr Ahern added that the money spent by the Department of the Environment on tackling homelessness increased from 12m four years ago to 50m this year.

“It might take a bit longer to achieve our target but the money has been put in and we are already a long way down the road to achieving it.”

Labour’s social affairs spokesperson Willie Penrose said it was time the Government stopped giving in to property developers and prioritised the rights of the homeless while it had the money to do so.