I move:
That leave be granted to introduce a Bill entitled an Act to make emergency provision to defer the termination dates of certain tenancies that fall, or would fall, during the period beginning on the day after the date of the passing of this Act and ending on 31 March 2024 in order to mitigate the risk that persons whose tenancies would otherwise be terminated during that period would be unable to obtain alternative accommodation; to make such provision on a phased basis to enable tenancies affected to be terminated over a period of time to assist in managing demands on housing services as a result of such deferred termination; and to provide for related matters.
As the Taoiseach knows, the Department of housing's homeless report was published on Friday. Yet again, every single category of recorded homelessness has increased from September to October. In the figures that have been released, the total number of children in emergency accommodation was 3,391. The Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, first took up Cabinet office in 2011. If you go back and look at the total number of children classified as homeless according to official records then, it was 641. That means that in the 12 years that Leo Varadkar has sat around the Cabinet table and Fine Gael has been in or led a Government, the number of children in emergency accommodation has increased by a staggering 429%. In fact, those figures do not reflect the true reality because the official figures released on Friday do not include women and children in Tusla-funded domestic violence refuges, as the Minister of State knows, men and women in religious emergency hostels not receiving any State funding, men, women and children who have been through the asylum system but granted leave to remain and are now trapped in direct provision, effectively using it as a form of emergency accommodation, or indeed the unknown number of people sofa surfing or living in inappropriate and inadequate accommodation. A similar comparison with the total number of people officially recorded as homeless over the 12 years of Fine Gael's tenure in office shows a 250% increase. It is just staggering.
When I looked at those figures today the thing that really struck me was that in 2011, this country was four years into some of the deepest austerity cuts we had ever seen. We had had the economic and property industry collapse spearheaded by Fianna Fáil and then the subsequent austerity budgets from 2007 to 2010. Yet now here we are. The economy is in a period of sustained economic growth. We have tax revenues that are the envy of Europe. We have a budget surplus, as well as enormous access to low-cost credit through the Housing Finance Agency, the European Investment Bank and others, and the total number of children in emergency accommodation has reached levels we never would have thought possible.
I listened carefully to the Taoiseach earlier when Deputy McDonald asked him if he would consider reintroducing the ban on no-fault evictions. He said the ban did not result in a reduction in homelessness. In fact, if the Taoiseach were to study those figures very carefully, he would have seen two trends. First, in the short period of time the ban on no-fault evictions was in place, the flow of families with children into emergency accommodation slowed down dramatically and was almost going in the other direction. Second, while single people were still falling into homelessness, that was also beginning to reduce. There was evidence that it was moving in the right direction. It is simply not the case that it was not working. It certainly was not working as fast as many would have liked and nor was it working as fast as the original Covid-19 ban on evictions but that emergency ban had a real tangible impact. That is not my view; it is the view of emergency homeless service providers.
The Taoiseach also said, and I could have misheard him, that the majority of people in emergency accommodation are in it for no more than six to eight months. I think those are the figures he used. First, we do not know whether that is the case outside of Dublin because no figures are published but in Dublin, almost 50% of families with children spend between 12 months and two years in emergency accommodation. For single people it is slightly less, although single people move in and out of emergency accommodation much more. We all have constituents, particularly those with large families, who have spent two to three years in emergency accommodation. It is not uncommon.
The Government's hope that slowly and incrementally increasing social housing output will deal with this issue is not going to work. It has not worked to date. Even if the Taoiseach is right that we will hit 8,000 new-build social homes, which is what some in government are privately telling us, that will not meet this level of need. Therefore, we need an emergency response. It is absolutely staggering that there was not a single new initiative in budget 2024 to stem the flow of families and single people into emergency accommodation and start to reduce it.
The Bill I am introducing today seeks to do exactly what the Government did last year and introduce a temporary ban on evictions. There is only thing I agree with the Taoiseach on from his comments earlier. He is right that a temporary ban on no-fault evictions does not solve the problem. However, it gives us breathing space; breathing space that he and his colleagues failed to use last year. The purpose of this Bill is not to fix the problem but to give ourselves breathing space to put in place the kind of package of emergency measures that Sinn Féin published in our alternative housing budget only a number of weeks ago and which emergency accommodation providers have been calling on the Taoiseach and his Government to introduce for quite some time. If he does not do what we are asking for, month after month after month, the number of adults, families, children and pensioners in emergency accommodation on his watch will increase. On that basis, I commend this Bill to the House. We will seek to move it on Second Stage as a matter of some urgency.
