Peter McVerry Trust, the national homeless and housing charity, has welcomed a further significant reduction in the official number of people in homelessness. The charity said there was an opportunity for the numbers to decrease further and hoped that more housing for single people could be secured in the coming weeks and months.

Pat Doyle CEO of Peter McVerry Trust said “We warmly welcome a further reduction in the official number of people in homeless services as recorded by the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government. Having fewer people reliant on homeless services and more families and individuals able to enjoy their own home again is positive and something we need to see a lot more of.”

“It is clear that the moratorium on rent increases and evictions has played a key role in this reduction as the level of people presenting as homeless over the past few months is down on previous years. This clearly demonstrates to an incoming Government the need to invest and prioritise prevention measures.”

“The figure has also dropped because there has been a significant increase in access to housing for people in homeless services, we have seen a significant increase in housing opportunities and been able to continue to progress people into housing throughout the COVID-19 restriction period.”

“We need to continue to ramp out the delivery of social housing units, particularly for single person households, as there are still acute challenges in securing the number of necessary one bedroom homes. The collapse of the short term holiday let market in our cities and large towns has brought many small scale property owners and larger investors to us with options on these types of units. However, we need a sustained and long term supply of the one and two bedroom homes if we are to reduce homelessness over the longer term as COVID-19 emergency measures are phased out.”