‘GAMING THE SYSTEM’ CLAIM

THE former head of the State’s Housing Agency was heavily criticised last year after he claimed that families were ‘gaming the system’ by declaring themselves homeless to jump up the housing waiting list.

Conor Skehan said the Government may have ‘unwittingly’ encouraged people to scam the housing allocation system.

In 2015, then-housing minister Alan Kelly ordered that 50% of social housing in Dublin must be allocated to homeless people. This setup ended in 2016, but Mr Skehan claimed it had been counterproductive. He said: ‘We unwittingly created a problem by prioritising selfdeclared homelessness above all other types of housing need, which created a distortion in the waiting list system and may have encouraged people to game the system.’