600 ‘wrongly called homeless’

AT least 600 people who have accommodation have wrongly been recorded as homeless, Minister For Housing Eoghan Murphy has said.

Mr Murphy said the whole system of calculating the numbers of homeless needs to be reformed. He said some local authorities had previously overstated the numbers by including some people in local authority housing, or people renting in the private sector but in receipt of social housing supports.

‘To date at least 600 individuals have been identified as having been categorised as homeless and in emergency accommodation when they are not,’ he said. ‘Some, but not all, of these individuals have been removed from the total numbers, but work continues with local authorities to gauge the total extent of the issue.’

The latest Department of Housing figures for March show a drop of 126 in the number of people in emergency accommodation around the country.

The current total is 9,681, down from 9,807 in February, while in Dublin, the number of homeless families has stayed the same at 1,329. The fall in the national figure may be due in part to the recalculation of how to count the homeless.

The Dublin Region Homeless Executive has reported that new presentations by families in need of emergency accommodation are down from 261 in February to 135 in March. However, the housing group Inner City Helping Homeless said it has seen an increase in families presenting themselves at Dublin Garda stations in recent weeks.

And Mike Allen, advocacy director of the Focus Ireland charity, said: ‘Following the good news about falling number of rough sleepers in Dublin, this will inevitably lead some commentators to believe the homeless crisis is at last under control. However, while we don’t want to be negative, we do have a duty to be realistic and draw attention to the fact that the overall figures show that there was a rise in the numbers of families homeless last year.’