‘No evidence people gaming the system’

Minister denies housing chief’s homeless scam claim

THERE is no evidence that people are trying to ‘game the system’ by pretending to be homeless to jump the housing queue, Minister Eoghan Murphy has said. He was responding to controversial comments by Conor Skehan, who retired as head of the Housing Agency last week.

Mr Skehan had said the State had ‘unwittingly created a problem’ by prioritising self-declared homelessness above all other types of housing need.

He was referring to the 2015 ministerial direction, by then housing minister Alan Kelly, that 50% of social housing in Dublin city and county must be allocated to homeless people.

A year after the ministerial direction came in, the number of homeless families had more than doubled.

This prioritisation, which ended in July 2016, had, Mr Skehan ‘Old policy’: Eoghan Murphy claimed, ‘created a distortion in the waiting list system and may have encouraged people to game the system’.

Housing Minister Mr Murphy said yesterday he would not criticise Mr Skehan’s comments, but he added that in his Department of Housing, he had seen no evidence of homeless people acting in such a way. ‘Conor Skehan is the chairperson of the Housing Agency. He advises on Government policy, how it might be impacting. I think it’s fair enough that he can do that. It’s his role. It’s not for me to criticise him for doing that. It’s important that we have different voices in this debate.

‘I’ve no evidence in my department of people presenting or trying to “game the system”. Again Conor was saying that that may have been an unintended consequence of previous government policy.

‘Homelessness is a very complex issue. People find themselves in a very difficult situation in their lives through no fault of their own. They come to local authorities and they come to our emergency response services looking for help.

‘When they come for help, we do a detailed assessment to see how best we can help them. We help them into temporary accommodation, but ideally help them into a permanent solution immediately, if we can do that.’

Mr Murphy’s comments come after the country’s most respected homelessness campaigner Fr Peter McVerry told the Irish Daily Mail yesterday that the numbers doing this to get a council house were only ‘a tiny, tiny fraction’ of homeless people’.

‘For a vast majority of families becoming homeless, they are being evicted from the private rental sector,’ he said.

‘There is no scam there. They are being thrown out. It is not their choice. If you become homeless, you will be placed in a hotel room for maybe 18 months or longer and that is no Butlins.’

And of Mr Skehan’s comments, that first appeared in an Irish Times article, Fr McVerry said: ‘An article like that creates the impression this is widespread.’

The head of advocacy at Focus Ireland, Mike Allen was also very critical of Mr Skehan’s comments.

‘There is no scam there’