Solving homelessness & the coalition talks (Mike Allen)
The Week in Housing 13/12/24
I’m delighted to bring you a guest post today by one of Ireland’s leading housing advocates, Mike Allen (Director of Advocacy, Focus Ireland). Mike argues that the urgent task of tackling homelessness has been neglected in the election campaign and the parties’ manifestos, with the focus instead on homeownership. In the context of coalition talks and the next Programme for Government, this is an important piece. Before diving in, a quick note about the Professional Cert in Social Justice, a 10 credit programme offered by the School of Social Policy, Social Work and Social Justice, UCD. The programme allows you to take my module Critical Political Economy next semester. It focuses on housing and may be of interest for those working in policy, research and advocacy in this sector. If you are interested please get in touch (michael.byrne@ucd.ie).
At this stage of Government formation there are two things that everyone agrees on, or at least agrees to say. The first is that when it comes to forming a new coalition: ‘policy is king’. Since housing and homelessness was the most important policy issue for voters in the Irish Times/RTÉ/TG4/TCD exit poll, with 29% of voters putting it top, there has been a lot of good analysis about the differences and similarities in housing policy between the potential partners.
But when it comes to looking at the second part of that concern, solving homelessness, you would search in vain for any analysis of the different approaches of the potential Government partners. Providing sufficient social homes is vital in tackling homelessness but it is not itself a homeless policy – we have seen over the last four years how welcome increases in social housing delivery have gone along with rising homelessness. Worryingly, the reason there is no discussion about forthcoming clashes on homeless policy is not because they agree on it so much, but that they seem to have so little to say.
A ‘top’ priority with little detail
Fine Gael mentioned homelessness 9 times in their manifesto, while Fianna Fáil, despite holding the Housing Ministry for the last 4.5 years, mentioned it just 4 times. None of these references reflected any substantial policy, existing or new, except for Housing First, which now enjoys universal support. This neglect is not because the complexity of homelessness makes it an unsuitable subject for manifestos, in 2020, these parties both referred to homelessness more than 30 times, with some of the references being clear commitments or insightful analysis. It is hard to say exactly why, as homelessness has increased, it is being given less policy attention but there is a strong sense that the outgoing Government parties have come to see it as something beyond their control. Fianna Fáil’s manifesto explained the 47% increase in homelessness since the election by saying “There are many reasons why people enter emergency accommodation, and the scale of population increases, and social changes have unfortunately limited the ability to make sustained progress.”
Perhaps their strategists saw it as something to avoid. When asked about homelessness in TV debates, all the party leaders quickly shifted the conversation to what they were going to do for ‘first time buyers’. Few people escape homelessness by purchasing a home.
There is a second thing that everyone agrees on: ‘if it is not in the programme for Government, it does not happen’. The process of negotiating a Programme usually involves jettisoning manifesto pledges likely to cause conflict with partners or that just look tarnished in the cold post-election light. So how can urgent policy concerns which received no manifesto attention find their way into the government programme?
Sinn Fein, with the many things it had to say about homelessness, will not be at the table. If one or both of the Centre left parties are seriously involved in coalition talks, there will be arguments to be had. They have listened closely to the evidence-based policy solution coming from the sector and included a wide range of proposals and commitments in their manifestos. But this is looking less and less likely and the independents and smaller parties have even less to say about solving homelessness than their larger partners.
If this turns out to be the shape of the coalition talks there is a real risk that the new Government may form around a total silence about homelessness, except for a line about how it is the ‘most pressing issue’ and a ‘top priority’, and of course that it is ‘complex’.
Where could policies come from?
There is a glimmer of light if we look beyond the manifestos, with a few more positive statements emerging during the debate. An Taoiseach, Simon Harris’ admission that he felt ‘shame’ at children in Ireland living in homeless accommodation was humane and welcome but, to echo his party colleagues of a decade ago, shame - like anger – is not a policy. Something more substantive emerged when Harris talked of the need to ensure that increased social housing was more effectively used to help families out of homelessness. This recognition of the need for more pro-active allocations policies is also mentioned in his party’s manifesto, but only in relation to families, ignoring the fact that single persons’ homelessness quadrupled to over 10,000 in the last decade. Nor is there engagement with the real challenges of getting local authorities to implement this and of convincing people that such an approach would be fair.
Fianna Fail more consistently avoided the issue during the election but, despite the rising numbers, there are many positive strands in the approaches they delivered in Government. Although they chose not to mention these, they could usefully be brought to the table: increased attention to the size and location of the social homes built, the youth homeless strategy, avoiding evictions by purchasing rental properties being sold and, perhaps most significantly, the instinct to shared problem solving that was tentatively expressed in the Minister’s National Homeless Action Committee.
And this is perhaps where the solutions may come from. Solving homelessness is indeed a complex issue requiring persistent Government attentiveness, but we should not be expecting Government to have all the answers, let alone be able to set them down in a manifesto or programme for government. The time in our history when we came closest to solving the homeless problem was when there were collaborative structures at local and national level. That approach was swept aside in the chaos that followed the economic crisis, but its lessons need to be remembered. Similar lessons were learnt during Covid, and again forgotten.
While it appears that the parties negotiating the programme for government will not arrive with manifestos full of evidence-based policies of how to solve homelessness, there are such solutions out there. Focus Ireland set out key policy areas that the next government should focus on here and a detailed proposal on how long-term homelessness can be ended over the lifetime of the next government here.
If the Programme for Government set some clear goals (such as ending long-term homelessness, preventing homelessness, maximizing the impact of new housing on homeless levels) and agreed a collaborative structure, with Cabinet support, for working through the details with those at the front-line, a lot could still be achieved.
Staying silent about homelessness may be a good tactic during an election but, with over 4,600 children facing Christmas in homeless accommodation, it would be a disastrous and expensive tactic for a government programme.
Thanks again to Mike for this guest post. You can keep with Focus Ireland’ analysis here and new research here. If you work in housing policy, research or advocacy and are interested in writing a guest post, please consider submitting a piece in 2025 (info here). Finally, this is my last post before Christmas. I’ll be back in mid-January with posts on counter-cyclical housing policy, active land management, the potential of public mortgages, and a series on the financialization of housing. Thanks to everyone who read, shared and subscribed in 2024.
Events & News
On December 17th Focus Ireland have a webinar on homeless fathers. I was on the Crazy House Prices podcast this week talking about housing, politics and the general election. In case you missed them, I was also recently on the Irish Times Inside Politics podcast talking about parties’ housing ideas, and Rory Hearne’s Reboot Republic Podcast talking about cost rental. Last week I unfortunately missed the RTB 20th anniversary conference. It seems to have been a very interesting event, and links to some recent important research (see below). Finally, a seminar with Josh Ryan Collins on Financialization: drivers, outcomes, options for reform is now available to watch here.
What I’m reading
Some really important research on the RPZs and rental price growth from the ESRI has just been published. The RTB published the latest profile of their register of tenancies, focusing on AHBs, as well as the latest rent index.