Peter McVerry Trust, the national housing and homeless charity, has published its pre-budget submission today. The charity is proposing a number of actions across three key areas; preventing homelessness, increasing the supply of social housing, and educational and employment supports.

Speaking at the publication of the pre-budget submission Pat Doyle, CEO Peter McVerry Trust said the submission focused on realistic and timely actions that the charity believed would strengthen efforts to tackle homelessness.

“As an organisation we concentrate our energies on identifying and delivering solutions to the needs of people who are impacted by homelessness. The proposed actions set out in our pre-budget submission today are all about putting in place more solutions to tackle the homeless crisis.”

“What we are setting out today are actions that would result in more housing for single people on the social housing waiting list, better protection for social tenants in the private rental sector, more effective tools to reuse empty buildings, increase the number of frontline social workers and ensure that children impacted homelessness have better access to third level education now and in the future.”

Our CEO Pat Doyle explains more in the video below.

Prevention – Private Rental Tenants

“We know that tenants are losing their private rental accommodation because small-scale landlords are exiting the system and selling the property with vacant possession. This leads to lots of problem, and pushes more people into homelessness in the context of a tight private rental sector.

Our proposal is to give a tax benefit to landlords of social tenants, who, if they decide to sell their property, leave tenants in situ and sell the property to a social housing provider or a local authority. This would allow the landlord to exit or retire from the sector, while also protecting tenants from becoming homelessness. Such a measure would also lessen churn and competition in the private rental sector and facilitate a shift from short or long term leasing from the private sector to a more traditional and sustainable model of social housing provision.”

Housing Supply – Single People and Housing First

“The biggest challenge in social housing delivery is ensuring that we provide enough one and two bedroom homes. It can be forgotten that the biggest cohort in homelessness and on the social housing waiting list is single person households. We are proposing that funding allocated for social housing delivery should be aligned with the Housing Needs Assessment and that additional capital funding should be made available to ramp up delivery of one bedroom homes in the next 12-18 months.” This additional supply of one bedroom homes will play a key role in ensuring the success of Housing First and progressing people beyond homelessness.”

Housing Supply – Empty Homes

“Peter McVerry Trust, as many people will know, is the leading advocate on the issue of empty homes in Ireland. We have spent the last few years bringing forward and delivering lots of new empty homes initiatives across Ireland, and has also informed much of our advocacy and policy positions. Among the proposals we’d like the government to implement are; a 0% VAT rate for construction projects involving the reuse of long-term vacant buildings, increasing the amount of credit available through the interest free loan under the Repair and Leasing scheme, introducing an empty homes tax, and offering landlords a reduced rate of capital gains tax to those who sell their properties to housing charities.”

Intensive Supports into Employment

“As Ireland reaches full employment there is a cohort who will not be able to access and sustain employment opportunities without intensive, personalised employment supports. If the Government were to set aside funding via the Department of Social protection to target young people and people who are long term homeless or now part of the housing first programme it would have numerous benefits in terms of homelessness and employment.”

Social Worker Bursary Programme

“We undoubtedly need more social workers today and will need even more in the future. In order to encourage more people to choose to work with the most vulnerable people in our society, and play a key role in making Ireland a better country, we propose that the government commit to consider the introducing a social worker bursary scheme. Investing in social workers will improve people’s lives and in a budgetary sense save money in the long run.”

See the report in full here.