Housing charity: State should focus on prevention

THE state must invest more in sustainable housing solutions rather than emergency accommodation and street services, national housing charity Threshold has warned.

Launching its annual report for 2010, chairwoman of Threshold Aideen Hayden said the cost of keeping a person in emergency homeless accommodation for one year is €29,000, whereas the cost of accommodating them in the private rented sector — with support — is about €11,000.

Ms Hayden said the majority of homeless people that come through its services could have been housed at a much earlier stage, or could have been prevented from entering into homelessness in the first place, if they had received more appropriate advice when they initially presented to the authorities with a housing problem.