Private accommodation for refugees costing twice as much as state housing

The State is paying more than twice the amount per night for privately owned accommodation for refugees and asylumseekers than state-owned housing.

Private accommodation, such as hotels and B&Bs, costs on average €76 per night to house Ukrainian refugees and asylum-seekers – whereas state-owned accommodation costs €30 on average.

So far this year €214m has been spent on private accommodation for asylum-seekers, compared with a figure of €627m for all of last year.

The figures were given by the Department of Integration’s secretary general Kevin McCarthy to Sinn Féin TD Imelda Munster at the Public Accounts Committee.

Mr McCarthy initially refused to publicly reveal the figures, telling Fianna Fáil TD James O’Connor they were commercially sensitive.

However, they had been given to the committee privately.

“Out of desperation”, the department overpaid on some hotel and B&B hotel contracts to house migrants, Mr McCarthy said. He admitted the department’s “rate card”, which sets out how much is paid per night, was “not always adhered to”.

However, when some hotel contracts were renewed, some rates were cut.

“We may have entered contracts in the early stages of this that did not represent value for money and in renewing those contracts, we would have renegotiated in line with our standard rate card,” Mr McCarthy said.

“There would absolutely be instances where, in renewing the contract, we insisted on adhering to our rate card, which wouldn’t have been adhered to in the teeth of the initial emergency crisis.

“Part of that was down to our desperation in the early days to procure beds.”

TDs were also told there are around 315 Ukrainians leaving state accommodation a week, while 105 are arriving in Ireland in the same period.

Last November, there were 60,000 in state-serviced accommodation and this has now fallen to just under 50,000.

The Government has yet to make a decision on whether protection will be extended to Ukrainians after the EU Temporary Protection Directive ends in March next year.

Mr McCarthy said there was a move towards “independence” when it came to Ukrainian refugees.

“The policy change and the direction of travel in terms of arrival rates and the numbers that are leaving our accommodation leads us to be thinking now about a future phase that involves much greater independence towards those [Ukrainian refugees] and that’s what we will be supporting,” he said.

He said that unlike for asylum-seekers, there was no international obligation to provide accommodation for Ukrainians under the EU directive.

“That obviously becomes a part of the thinking as well,” he said.

In recent months the Government decided to cut welfare rates for new Ukrainian arrivals from €220 per week to the same as applies to asylum-seekers – €38.80 a week.

Newly arriving Ukrainian refugees now get only 90 days in state-serviced accommodation.

Social Protection Minister Heather Humphreys said it was unsustainable to keep paying tens of thousands of refugees the €220 weekly rates while they lived in state housing.