'Unintentional oversight' led to overcounting of homeless adults

The full extent of the overcounting, which was first revealed last September, saw an extra 299 people recorded as being in emergency accommodation when the service user had left the accommodation. File picture: Larry Cummins

A report into the overcounting of the number of adults who were homeless has found it was caused by "an unintentional oversight" due to two data recording systems being used at the same time.

The full extent of the overcounting, which was first revealed last September, saw an extra 299 people recorded as being in emergency accommodation when the service user had left the accommodation and was then wrongly recorded in some homeless reports published by the Dublin Regional Homeless Executive (DRHE).

The overcounting issue first occurred in 2019 but only impacted a handful of cases, but the cumulative numbers wrongly recorded increased significantly between January 2022 and July 2023, when the issue was first detected.

A new report for the DRHE into the issue has found that: "Notably, these homeless data reporting errors did not impact on homeless people’s access to emergency accommodation or spending on homeless accommodation by the DRHE."

The Report on Errors in Data on Homeless Emergency Accommodation Usage in Dublin was conducted by Dr Cliodhna Bairéad and Professor Michelle Norris of the Geary Institute for Public Policy at University College Dublin.

Two data systems

It involved a comprehensive trawl of the Pathway Accommodation and Support System (PASS) database used to manage the allocation of emergency accommodation for homeless people, as well as different reporting software databases used to confirm emergency accommodation bed occupancy.

The probe found that as the DRHE started to use private emergency accommodation (PMA) such as private hotels and B&Bs to deal with the increasing number of people who were homeless, those private accommodation providers were not initially given access to the PASS database. 

Central Placement Service (CPS) staff originally recorded bookings into and departures from private emergency accommodation by regularly contacting accommodation providers in what was described as a "time-consuming" process, leading to the CPS introducing queue systems management software called Front Desk, which the private emergency accommodation providers could access to record service user arrivals and departures.

That system was successfully used by private accommodation providers between January 2022 and July 2023 but since the Front Desk System was not integrated into PASS, data had to be manually entered into the latter system by CPS staff for the purpose of monitoring overall emergency accommodation usage and for helping to generate homeless reports.

The central issue, according to the report, was "when some service users departed from PEA and the booking was closed on Front Desk, their departure was not recorded in all cases on PASS and their accommodation booking was not closed on PASS."

Front Desk was fully integrated into the PASS system in July last year, a move which the authors of the report said was a satisfactory solution.

"The number of misreported departures from emergency accommodation was not large enough to have a significant impact on overall trends in recorded homelessness in Ireland between January 2022 and July 2023,” the report said.

"These errors are unlikely to reoccur because the use of Front Desk in conjunction with PASS was terminated in July 2023."

The report makes recommendations as to how to improve recording and reporting of homelessness data, including addressing a "confusing feature" on PASS where, when cancellations occur, no end date is generated on the client's booking history.