Dáil Éireann Debate, Tuesday - 17 November 2020
393. Deputy Eoin Ó Broin asked the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage the mechanisms in place for assessing the effectiveness of the National Housing Strategy for Persons with a Disability 2011; and the impact it has had on disabled persons’ lives. [36934/20]
View answerThe National Housing Strategy for people with a Disability (NHSPWD) 2011-2016 and associated National Implementation Framework were jointly published by my Department and the Department of Health. They set out the Government’s broad framework for the delivery of housing for people with disabilities and were developed as part of a coherent framework in conjunction with the Government’s mental health policy, A Vision for Change (2008), and the report of the working group on congregated settings, Time to Move on from Congregated Settings (2011). In 2016, the Strategy was extended to allow it to continue to achieve its aims.
Implementation of identified actions in the NHSPWD is being driven primarily by the Housing Agency by means of a dedicated sub-group comprising representatives from my Department, the Health Service Executive (HSE), the Department of Health, local authorities, the Irish Council for Social Housing and various disability representative organisations. The Housing subgroup, established in 2012, is progressing a range of priority actions. An Implementation Monitoring Group (IMG) was established in 2012 to monitor and report on progress, and has met on sixteen occasions since then with a further meeting scheduled for December 2020. Five progress reports on implementation covering the period September 2012 to December 2018, have been published by the IMG to date. These comprehensive reports are available on my Department’s website at the following link:
http://www.housing.gov.ie/housing/policy/people-disability/housing-people-disability.
The National Housing Strategy for People with a Disability will be reviewed by my Department and the Department of Health in 2021.
