Five people entering homelessness for every one person who exits, committee told

Dermot Kavanagh from Cork Simon told the committee he was seeing a 'growing number of working homeless' in the city and county. He said many people are working, but this 'does not offer a route out of homelessness'. File picture: Leah Farrell / RollingNews.ie

Five people are entering homelessness for every one person who exits, an Oireachtas committee has been told.

The backlog of exits from the emergency accommodation system was pinpointed as a major reason homelessness has reached record levels by representatives of homelessness agencies and charities at the Oireachtas housing committee on Tuesday.

Mary Hayes from the Dublin Regional Homeless Executive (DRHE) said the gap between monthly average new presentations and monthly average exits to tenancies has been widening since 2021. 

In 2022, for every one exit, five singles entered emergency accommodation. For families, the average rate of new presentations to homeless services fell in 2019 and 2020 but has been on the increase, however, the converse is true for exits as the average rate increased in 2019 and 2020.

Ms Hayes said new presentations were not the predominant reason for rising figures, but exits to tenancy were not happening at the same rate. She said this was a concern because this leads to a "banking", or build-up, of homelessness.

Ms Hayes said in the capital, there is a "very, very tight ceiling" for capacity and services are "just about making it on single people".

"We manage, but just about," she said, adding accommodation would be found for families "come what may".

"The impact is that we're spending money on emergency accommodation and not housing," Ms Hayes added.

Working homeless

Dermot Kavanagh from Cork Simon told the committee he was seeing a "growing number of working homeless" in the city and county. He said many people are working, but this "does not offer a route out of homelessness". 

He said without innovations such as the Housing First programme — which supplies housing and wraparound services to people with complex housing needs — the charity would need a facility the same size as its Anderson's Quay shelter.

Wayne Stanley of the Simon Communities told the committee that while the war in Ukraine may have put pressure on local authorities, "there is nobody in homeless accommodation because we took in people from Ukraine". 

His colleague John Durkan said accommodation being pressed into use by IPAS [International Protection Accommodation Services] was not generally the same as that being sought by homeless services.

John Mark McCafferty of Threshold told the committee there had been an increase in the number of people experiencing “hidden homelessness”. 

In the first three months of this year, he said, 68 households were forced to “couchsurf”, staying with family and friends.

The update to the committee came as the Residential Tenancies Board  released figures which showed that from January to March this year, a further 4,753 eviction notices have been issued to tenants. The majority of these have been issued because of the sale of a property by a landlord.