Official Report: Minutes of Evidence

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): I welcome to the meeting Mr Colum Boyle, permanent secretary, Department for Communities; Mr Paul Price, acting deputy secretary for the housing and sustainability group; Ms Grainia Long, chief executive of the Northern Ireland Housing Executive; Catherine McFarland, director of finance, audit and assurance, Northern Ireland Housing Executive; Stuart Stevenson, Treasury Officer of Accounts, Department of Finance; and Dorinnia Carville, Comptroller and Auditor General, and colleagues from the Northern Ireland Audit Office (NIAO). You are all very welcome. It is great to have you with us today. We deeply appreciate your time. I invite you to make, in whatever appropriate order, some brief opening remarks. Members have quite a lot of questions, and we will go from there.

Mr Colum Boyle (Department for Communities): Thank you, Chair. Many thanks for requesting that DFC and the Housing Executive appear before the Committee today. Together with our strategic housing partner, the Northern Ireland Housing Executive, we welcome the opportunity to focus the spotlight on the critical issue of homelessness in Northern Ireland. We fully accept the recommendations from the NIAO in respect of its report, and we have already been active for some time in taking forward the necessary actions to improve how we deliver on our statutory and public service delivery obligations on homelessness. It is very helpful and informative to see the challenging context of homelessness called out in the NIAO report, in particular because it highlights a backdrop that reflects the soaring demand and costs for temporary accommodation arising from COVID-19; the significantly increased rental costs in the private rented sector; the reduced capacity of the private rented sector as landlords leave the sector; the very difficult and constrained budgetary climate being faced by DFC and the Housing Executive, which is putting pressure on the available funding to take forward very important homelessness prevention work; and the relatively small but growing number of households with leave to remain in Northern Ireland reporting to the Housing Executive as requiring homelessness services.

In summary, the complexity of homelessness as an issue has deepened considerably and requires a strategic and operational response, which DFC, together with the Housing Executive, and also engaging with other Departments and organisations, has been actively engaged in for some time. It is also important to recognise that Northern Ireland is not the only jurisdiction affected by the challenge of finding secure and permanent sustainable accommodation for people who find themselves homeless, but we see the scope for improvement identified in the NIAO report and acknowledge and welcome that. We can respond to any questions from the Committee on points emerging from the NIAO report. Thank you.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Thank you. Grainia, would you like to add to that?

Ms Grainia Long (Northern Ireland Housing Executive): Yes, thank you, Chair. Good afternoon, members, and thank you for your time. It is entirely appropriate that we spend some time today on assurance, systems and processes, and that is absolutely right. As housing professionals, our view is that homelessness is a profoundly human story, so I suspect that, over the course of this afternoon, we will also hear about the focus that we have had on the profound effect of homelessness on child development and on young people in particular.

As accounting officer, I am acutely aware of our legal obligations. I think that, over the past number of years, we are unique in not having failed in our legal duty, and that is an extremely important point. Everything that we have done has effectively been on ensuring that we meet our legal obligations to people who are often at their most vulnerable. We have not overspent our budget, which is a critical area of concern for me, as accounting officer, and for my colleagues. The Housing Executive is a £1·3 billion organisation and, in an organisation that big, sometimes homelessness could be seen as a side issue, and it is not. In the Housing Executive, it is the highest risk in our risk register. It is an issue that is discussed at length by our executive team, our audit committee and our board, and we have gripped the issue. It is not an accident that, on the basis of all that, homelessness presentations in Northern Ireland are decreasing, which makes us unique in these islands. We have reduced the number of placements in temporary accommodation. We have prioritised the quality of our temporary accommodation; 80% is own-front-door, and the profound effect that that has on people in ensuring high-quality accommodation is really important to state. We have controlled spend on temporary accommodation and have saved the public purse, in the past three years, £13·8 million from the steps that we have taken. It is really important that we highlight that for you today and give you the assurance on that basis. We have also — I thought at one point that we would never be able to say this — reduced the unit cost of hotels and bed and breakfast accommodation by 11%, and our use of bed and breakfasts and hotels is 30% lower than in England. That is the focus of a huge amount of work by my organisation, in partnership with the Department.

There is much more that we can say, but of course — I think that the Audit Office report has been very helpful in setting this out — in doing that, we have had to make trade-offs and decisions about where we put our resources, people, time and money, and I think that the report has been very helpful in shining a light on the areas that we now need to improve on, and I look forward to a discussion on that.

The next phase of our homelessness strategy must ensure sufficient funding for that strategic shift towards prevention and the development of Housing First and other models, because we need to move very large numbers of people out of temporary accommodation. We need to resource case management — that person-to-person service that we have been unable to resource at the scale that we have needed to — and, of course, we need significant additional capital funding. I am sure that we will come on to all of that, but fundamentally we welcome the report. The work that we have done is person-centred and focused on ensuring that we do not fail in our legal duty.

Two nights ago, a family in temporary accommodation was attacked, and that family has had to deal with the effects of that. Our teams on the ground will deal with that over the next number of days. Homelessness absolutely remains an area of absolute priority for the organisation. I am happy to take questions. Thank you.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Thank you both for keeping your opening remarks brief. Paul and Catherine, you will have an opportunity to come in as we proceed through the line of questioning from members. You are both very welcome.

My line of questioning is relevant to you both, but before I ask a few questions: for the sake of public record, how many people as of today are homeless in Northern Ireland?

Ms Long: As of today, the number of full-duty applicants, which has grown, stands at 31,719. That is the number of people who have the highest level of protection afforded to them under the homelessness legislation. That legislation has a wide definition, and we can come on to that if you like.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): How many of those 31,719 are in temporary accommodation?

Ms Long: As of March of this year, there were 5,412.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): OK. And how many of those people were without anywhere to live?

Ms Long: We undertake a rough sleeper count. Are you talking about people who literally have no roof over their heads?

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): It depends on how it is defined. There is often an illusion about people who are sofa-surfing and all sorts, but how many of that number are in absolute critical need?

Ms Long: We have a duty to anybody who is statutorily homeless, and we provide temporary accommodation to 5,124 of those people. Those people are most in need if they cannot make other arrangements. Part of the reason why we saw the growth in demand for temporary accommodation after the pandemic was that we had very high numbers of people who were legally homeless. They had come to us, and we had assessed their need, but they were sofa-surfing and were asked, during the restrictions that were applied during COVID, to move out of that accommodation. The soaring demand that we have seen over the past number of years is precisely what you are getting at, Chair, which is that those people who were not able to make their own arrangements were sofa-surfing and needed to come to us. Well over 5,000 households are in temporary accommodation, and between 70 and 80 people are sleeping rough. We undertake a rough sleeper count every November, so we will have updated figures on that, but that is a very different cohort. I am very happy to come back to you on that.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): I am starting with figures deliberately, because this is a human story. Is that 31,719 individual people?

Ms Long: That is households.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): So that figure is much more significant.

Ms Long: Absolutely. There is often a discussion about why we count households and why we do not count people. The reason is that part of the response to homelessness is a housing response, so we need to be able to measure housing need. The Housing Executive has a really important role in measuring housing need on the basis of the number of homes that we need to provide. I would not in any way want to take away from the fact that, beneath that 31,719, there is a larger number of people, but that is a household number, just to be clear.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Does the Housing Executive keep a record of the individuals within that figure? For instance, quite a lot of people over the age of 18 are remaining at home now until they are 30, for many reasons, such as not being able to get a mortgage, not having access to good opportunities and not having access to housing. They are really stuck at home as a result of those issues. Do you have an actual breakdown of individuals out of that 31,719?

Ms Long: Yes, we do, and we are often asked for it. In fact, I seem to remember that, when the Simon Community launched its recent three-year strategy, it asked us for data on the total number of people, and we were able to provide it. In some households, there may be children living in two households, for example. Part of the reason why we publish the data on the basis of households rather than individuals is because sometimes people live in two households, and that is often children. We gather that data, and we can certainly make that available to you. It is a fairly time-consuming exercise to make that available because the system requires us to count households, but I am very happy to write to you and provide you with that.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Do you have it with you today?

Ms Long: No, I do not have it with me today.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Do you have any idea?

Ms Long: On the basis of what I was taught as a housing professional, the normal calculation is a household multiplied by 2·4.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): That is a substantial figure.

Ms Long: That is the basis on which we operate in the Housing Executive.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Finally, is there a specific trend in the demographic of household or individual that is being affected disproportionately by homelessness in Northern Ireland compared with any other?

Ms Long: If you are asking me about the total number of people, about 48% of households require one-bedroom accommodation, so they are either single people or couples. Separately, in answer to your question about whether there is a group that is disproportionately affected, certainly there is, and they are people with a range of complex needs. First of all, children are the most profoundly affected by homelessness, older people and people with any range of physical or mental health needs. Again, we can come on to that. However, to answer your question in the clearest sense, the largest group that comes to us in need of homelessness assistance is single-person households. They make up 48%.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Is it largely men?

Ms Long: Yes.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Can you give me an indication of the percentage difference there? I am sure that members will pick up on a similar issue. It is very difficult to get single men accommodated. Can you give us the figures?

Ms Long: Forty-eight per cent are single-person households. The majority of those will be single men. Again, I can follow up on that. If I have it in my file and find it over the course of today, I will give it to you. We are seeing a small but steady increase in the number of single women who are presenting with complex needs. We have a significant number of pieces of work in our work stream that are focused on women and chronic homelessness.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): By your calculation, Grainia, multiplying the figure by 2·4 would give an estimate of 76,125 individuals.

Ms Long: Full-duty applicants, yes.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): That is a huge figure. Given the soaring cost of temporary accommodation — you referenced that in your opening remarks in relation to progress that has been made — the increase in the number of homeless households on the social housing waiting list and the reduced focus on prevention in recent years, has the homelessness strategy failed, in your opinion?

Ms Long: I do not believe that the homelessness strategy has failed, and there is no evidence to suggest that it has. I will always say that housing is about people and numbers. The great thing about housing is that you can tell what is working through the numbers. A number of things have happened in the past number of years. The first was when the pandemic hit. There have been three shocks. The first was a demand and supply shock after the pandemic. A large number of providers of homelessness accommodation had to reduce the number of people whom they could house because of the restrictions. We also had large numbers of people who were already homeless, as I said, and who, at the time, did not need temporary accommodation from the Housing Executive but then suddenly needed it very quickly. We went from 3,000 to 10,000 placements per year in an 18-month period. I have never seen anything like that in my career, and I have worked outside this jurisdiction as well as here. That was the first shock.

The second shock — we will all remember it — was the economic shock that followed the pandemic. A different group of people came to us, and they were to a large extent families who lost their tenancies in the private rented sector. I remember writing to Colum about this in 2022 when we began to see, very quickly, landlords either stepping out of the market or defaulting on their mortgages, which remains an issue today. Therefore, we saw, to a large extent, families coming to us, so a different group of people, different cohort, different set of needs.

The third shock was more recent and much smaller, and that is the number of people who have come to us from outside Northern Ireland since the Home Office accelerated its leave-to-remain decisions.

Those three shocks together have left a situation whereby 3,000 temporary accommodation placements per year pre COVID are now at 11,500.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Is it the case that the strategy is not designed for such challenges?

Ms Long: No. The strategy has had to shift its emphasis from all three pillars to one pillar. The strategy is made up of there pillars: prevention, support and sustain. Prevention, which we will come on to, is not something that we have been able to fund. We have not received from the Department the funding that we needed for that. We received prevention funding, but not sufficient. The second pillar is to support people while they are homeless and to give them the type of accommodation that they need when homeless. The third pillar is to deal with chronic homelessness.

To answer your question, what we needed to do over that period of three shocks was to focus as many people and as much time and money as we could on the second pillar, which meant how did we ensure that we had the accommodation to meet that extraordinary and unprecedented level of need and demand? What we did was move fast. Our teams moved quickly to increase the portfolio of temporary accommodation that we needed, and, in doing so, we made two important decisions that have stood us well. The first was that we decided that we would work so that the majority of temporary accommodation in Northern Ireland would be own-front-door accommodation. That is more expensive, but more sustainable. The upshot of that is that we are beginning to see the number of placements decreasing every year. When people go into that temporary accommodation, it is more suitable for them, and they are not moving around as much. That is saving money on the public purse, and you can see the effects of that.

The second decision that we took, which I am very proud of, was that we would not place children in hotel accommodation, or, if we did, it would be for no longer than two weeks. That was a voluntary key performance indicator that we set ourselves. We were not required to do that by law or by policy. It was the right decision. It has cost money, because the knock-on effect has meant needing to find suitable temporary accommodation. As of today, however, we are in a situation that is unique on these islands whereby 1% of the total placements in temporary accommodation are children in hotels. That is unique in Scotland, Wales, England and the Republic of Ireland. As of today, the average length of stay is 15 days. Scotland set that target, but no longer meets it. Northern Ireland meets that target. That has cost, but, as an accounting officer, my personal responsibility is to achieve value for money (VFM) for the public purse, not just my organisation. We took that seriously. We have without question saved Health, Education and the criminal justice system money because of those two decisions. As difficult as it was to focus disproportionately on one element or pillar of that strategy, not having the funding for prevention has resulted in a much higher quality of accommodation. The figures for this year show that, for the first time in many years, the number of placements in temporary accommodation is going down, the number of people overall in bed and breakfasts is beginning to come down, and we have reduced the unit cost — the cost of hotel accommodation — by 11%. Those are three demonstrators of the fact that the strategy has worked.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): How much is the prevention funding, as of today?

Ms Long: We bid for £4·5 million and have received £2·7 million. That is for strategic prevention. Again, I want to be very clear here. That is a particular type of prevention that is aimed at upstream prevention. Other prevention funding has been available. The Supporting People programme, which is an extremely important programme that exists in Northern Ireland but not elsewhere, has been maintained very well over the past number of years. Providers will, rightly and understandably, say that it has not increased quickly enough to meet the costs that they need to meet, but the fact that 36% of the Supporting People budget is spent on homelessness shows that there is a prevention fund there. There was also wider community-based prevention funding that continued throughout. I do not want to give the Committee the impression that the only prevention budget is that £2·7 million; there are other prevention budgets. I am very happy to cover that in more detail.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): For the record, it is still less than what was bid for and what was needed.

Ms Long: We bid each year. Over the past number of years, we have made an annual bid to the Department for prevention funding.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Thank you, Grainia. Colum, do you, as permanent secretary of the Department, believe that the homelessness strategy has failed?

Mr Boyle: The homelessness strategy was written for a particular time and for a particular type of homelessness. Grainia outlined the shocks and the massive increase in the number of people requiring temporary accommodation. That has outstripped where the strategy is. The strategy has had to go into full emergency mode for a period of time. The fact that Grainia is describing how she is starting to crest the figures and starting to see the numbers go down is testament to the fact that we have a level of control over that. I do not think that any strategy, with the best will in the world, would have equipped us for what was coming over the hill after COVID, but the speed and agility of the response has been fantastic.

The Department and the Housing Executive have worked very closely together. We have a very strong partnership. I think that it is one of the finest between a Department and an arm's-length body (ALB). It is not cosy; there are challenges in it, and we are very robust in that regard. It is very businesslike and professional, and we can get things done. Grainia spoke about the Supporting People budget. We made sure that we protected that budget. We made other sacrifices in the Department's budget to make sure that that was sustained. We also made sure that more money became available for homelessness prevention so that we could start to meet the costs of temporary accommodation. We went into the Housing Executive forensically and had a very hard look at whether it had any more money that could be put into that. It did not. We had to do that for due diligence, which we did very quickly.

To answer your question, I think that the strategy was good and has a lot of good characteristics in it, but it was sorely tested. I think that we have done very well to be able to step outside of the emergency mode and really focus on the temporary accommodation piece.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): What is your assessment of having 76,125 individuals — statutory — what is the correct term, Grainia, statutory homeless?

Ms Long: Full-duty applicants.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Full-duty applicants.

Mr Boyle: It is way too many people. As a society, we would want to have an awful lot fewer. As a society, however, we need to be able to fund that to respond, and we do not have enough funding available to do that. I understand the difficulty that the Executive face with so many pressures across the public sector. We could say that there are so many things that we would love to fund more, but we do not have the money. That is a very difficult prioritisation for them, so I do not envy them their task, and we respect fully what they do. I worked in benefits for a long time. Having a roof over your head is a fundamental in life, and having your own roof over your head and that roof being permanent and sustainable is a right. There is more that we can do, but it will require money.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): There is nothing more urgent than someone having the security of their own home. We referenced figures quite a bit in the opening of the session. I referred to a crude calculation of 76,125, but my own office has just reached out to me and said that, if we are being realistic, the estimate could be anything from 75,000 up to 136,000 adults in Northern Ireland living in that situation because they have no other options or opportunities. The figure is damning, and it points to a strategy that either cannot cope with the demand or cannot deliver at all. That is where we are focused.

There has been a range of strategies, Colum. You and I have had this discussion on different issues before. There has been a range of action plans and consultations on homelessness, but the assessment at the grassroots level from the public would be that little progress has been made towards the main strategic objectives on homelessness in Northern Ireland. Is there too much planning and discussion and not enough action?

Mr Boyle: That is a very good question, and there are a number of ways to answer it. One is to look at other jurisdictions and see how they are coping with the same set of problems. From that point of view, in relative terms, we have done reasonably well. I think that we have done very well, and that is not to make light of homelessness as a problem. We have to understand that, whether you are south of the border or in England, Scotland or Wales, exactly the same set of problems exist. Not only that, but the Housing Executive meets its statutory obligations to provide temporary accommodation and put roofs over people's heads. As accounting officer, the task is to make sure that that is met and done within budget. My task as accounting officer in DFC is to make sure that the budget that I provide, and whatever else I raid from within the DFC budget, enables that. Action has been taken within the Department and the Housing Executive to do the best that we can, and, on these islands, we have done incredibly well.

That does not mean to say that there is not a chronic problem facing us, because there is. To deal with that in a much more strategic way, a number of different levers have to be pulled, and they all require significant funding. It is not just one in isolation. We spoke earlier about young men with complex needs and mental health issues. That is a huge problem. I am having conversations with permanent secretary colleagues about that on a regular basis. We are talking to Health about what needs to be done to alleviate that problem. Grainia spoke about saving Health money, but there are issues where Health needs to come in to bat. Health sees and appreciates that and is coming to that, which is welcome. That is positive. I am seeing a new dispensation among permanent secretaries to get involved in that. I am certainly seeing it at ministerial level, and we have a Minister who is absolutely focused on the issue, who wants to make a difference, and who wants to see a lot more action than planning. The last thing that he does is plan and talk a thing to death. He wants outcomes and results, and that is what we have been trying to provide.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Thank you. I have taken up more time than I should have done.

Mr Gildernew: Just a couple of wee quick ones before I go into my more substantive ones. In relation to the Chair's question, Grainia, why are we extrapolating the number of people when we could just simply be counting and recording them with another click or two?

Ms Long: We do. We will furnish you, after the meeting, with the number of people, as well as the number of households. The reason that we do not is that we need to be careful that we do not double-count, because in some families, children live across two households. That was the point that I was making.

Another thing to mention, which is really important because I know that people are watching this today from across the voluntary and community sector, who will hope that we do not come to the conclusion, in policy terms, that it is too difficult and that the numbers are so big that we need something transformational in a legislative sense, which will lead to less protection. I will take my guidance from elsewhere on that, as the head of the Housing Executive, but Northern Ireland has a more generous and wider definition of homelessness than other jurisdictions. That is not, in any way, to move away from the numbers, because housing is about people and numbers, but our definition is broader, and we have not resiled from that, and there is nothing that I have seen in the past few years that would make me think that we should.

It is important to say that, and also the fact that our obligation to a household that is homeless, and is a full-duty applicant household, is to provide them with temporary accommodation until we can provide them with, essentially, a social housing tenancy. That means when somebody enters temporary accommodation, they are likely to be there for a considerable time. In fact, the average now is over 600 days. That is two years in which a family will stay in temporary accommodation until we can provide them with a social housing tenancy. We are looking at, and we may come on to this point as to how, in the future, we can discharge into other tenures, provided protections are there. However, part of the reason that the numbers are the way that they are, with regard to the number of people who are homeless and the number of households that are homeless, is that our definition of homelessness is broad. That is a good thing; it protects people, which is an important point to make.

Mr Gildernew: Thank you. A question occurred to me as you were speaking, Colum, about the crisis and the emergency that you referenced. In light of that, how can we account for the fact that 3,200 homes have been sold by the Housing Executive since 2017? That is the equivalent of 30% of new starts. Why has the Minister set his face against a moratorium or ending the right-to-buy scheme at present, given that other jurisdictions have done that? I believe that the Housing Executive has expressed its concern about that. For every 100 new starts, we are losing 30% of them to right-to-buy. Why is the Minister taking that approach?

Mr Boyle: I know that you have had that conversation with the Minister previously, and he has given you his view. We give the Minister a range of advice, and he has his perspective and makes up his mind. His view is that he wants to make sure that other options are available to increase the options for people to have new homes. That is what he has been trying to do with affordable housing, trying to boost the amount of social housing and trying to have that engagement, through DOF with Treasury, about borrowing powers for the Housing Executive, so that more money is available to look after the existing assets and build more. The Minister has been very active across the piece; he has not gone down the road that you have asked about, and he has his own particular reasons for that.

Paul, you have been involved in some of those discussions. Do you want to add to that?

Mr Paul Price (Department for Communities): Yes, in the past 10 years, we have built 9,000 new social homes. Some years back, we managed to remove the right-to-buy scheme for housing associations —

Mr Gildernew: I have taken that into account.

Mr Price: The Housing Executive is the one that remains. We tested the Executive's appetite to do something about that, under Minister Hargey, but they did not want to. It will take primary legislation. In the meantime, you can edit or amend the scheme, and that is always under review. For example, for a certain type of property, there is a more compelling case to keep them in social supply.

Mr Gildernew: Is there work ongoing, because it is quite urgent, given that we are in the middle of the crisis? That cannot wait. We would hope that things will get better before some of that work is completed.

Mr Price: Yes, it is, but it is about editing the scheme. It is using the power to amend the scheme, rather than addressing, which you would have to do through primary legislation, the continuation of the scheme on its current numbers.

Mr Gildernew: Are we expecting an announcement about the editing of the scheme?

Mr Price: I am not sure; it is subject to the Minister. There will be no dates for that, but whether to take certain properties out of the scheme is always under review.

Mr Gildernew: OK. Thank you. That is a key question, and I will come back to it in due course, but anyway.

Mr Price: I appreciate that.

Mr Gildernew: Grainia, this question is for you. The first objective of the homelessness strategy is prevention. We really need to get upstream to prevent people from falling into homelessness, rather than, as you have said, the urgent need to secure accommodation to meet the need versus the urgency to prevent the need. Why have you not been able to prioritise greater funding to prevent homelessness?

Ms Long: Prevention is the priority in the strategy. We are deeply committed to it, and every spare penny in the homelessness budget that we could have spent over the past few years has been put towards prevention.

There are three types of prevention: primary, secondary and tertiary. Primary prevention is universal and so, for example, we have been able to fund organisations such as Housing Rights to provide its online advice service. That is open to everyone, so that is the universal element of prevention. Secondary prevention is focused on key groups. At every stage in our annual funding year, through our community support and prevention funding, we have supported the Welcome Organisation, which has funded a number of organisations to provide an outreach service. Welcome provides outreach, for example. Tertiary prevention is focused on key groups, and one of the programmes that we are all most proud of is Complex Lives, which is well known. It takes a person-centred approach to chronic homelessness.

The outcomes of all those programmes have been monitored. We know what works, and we would love to scale up. I would personally love to scale up Complex Lives, not just in Belfast but across Northern Ireland, because chronic homelessness is a really significant issue. Most fundamentally, we have not been able to do that because the funding has not been available, and that is because we have been collectively putting that funding into accommodation. It is as simple as that. It is not unique to Northern Ireland. Every jurisdiction, including across Europe, looks at that. How you get the balance right between the urgent and the important? It probably goes beyond just homelessness, from a public policy point of view.

In answer to it, would a statutory duty on prevention help? If we put a statutory duty on the right to assistance, would that help? I do not mean accommodation-based assistance but wider assistance. That is what some other jurisdictions have done. We can learn lessons, positive and negative, from that.

Mr Gildernew: That leads me nicely on to my next question, which is for you, Colum. Currently, we spend £5·5 million out of a total budget of £75·3 million. About £36 million is going into temporary accommodation. You have made a request for additional funding that has been declined by the Department. You would think that an additional amount to that £5·5 million would have a big impact. Why has the Department declined that bid for additional preventative funding?

Mr Boyle: The extra money would make a difference; we accept that absolutely. The bottom line is that we do not have enough money. I will give you an insight to that from the figures. Between 2022-23 and 2025-26, we increased the Housing Executive's homelessness resource budget from £21·6 million to £37 million. That is a 71% increase in that time. We were under the hammer in trying to cope with the crisis, as I talked about earlier. The choice between engaging in some extra money for prevention and putting in place some extra money to meet the statutory obligation to provide temporary accommodation is a no-brainer, I am sorry. We had to meet the demand right here, right now. I totally get the prevention thing: I have absolutely no issue with prevention, but it is not statutory, and our first obligation is to meet the statutory piece.

Mr Gildernew: I get that, Colum, but people looking at the Department see a big Department, responsible for a lot of things and making a lot of spending announcements on many issues. It would seem that this is one initiative that would benefit people, generate savings and, more importantly, make an impact on people's lives. Some people find it difficult to rationalise why there cannot be more money from within the Department, given some of the things that have been —

Mr Price: I can deal with that. The report specifically says that strategic prevention was not properly prioritised in 2023-24. We had to go to great lengths in the Department to fund the requirement for temporary accommodation. Included on that list was strategic prevention. Also on the list was an inflationary uplift for the providers of the Supporting People programme and funding for the starter packs for people who get placed in temporary accommodation. Those are the little bundles of household items that they need to make their temporary accommodation successful. Those things were taken out.

My problem with that particular point in the report is that the option of funding strategic prevention was simply not available, to the extent that all those other things were also not available. It was that important point —

Mr Gildernew: I get the difference and the need to do more around the housing allocation. However, a quarter of a million pounds has been allocated to America celebrating its 250th anniversary. With regard to the priorities in the wider Department, would that quarter of a million pounds, or money like that, not make a serious impact?

Mr Price: There is headroom available in 2025–26 that was not available in 2023–24, and that has helped. It is helpful that homelessness prevention is now prioritised in the Programme for Government, and it is helpful that there is a Minister who can follow up on that priority and ring-fence the protection.

Prior to that, in previous years, particularly under the hugely volatile demand for temporary accommodation, we were always having to anticipate its increase. There was no option available to ring-fence strategic prevention.

Mr Boyle: To answer your question, our Minister has a range of strategic priorities. He has a set of ministerial priorities that he has been very clear about with us. He gets the importance of all those things, and he is the first Minister —. We had no Minister in place from 2017 to 2020. From 2020 to 2022, we were in the middle of COVID, and we had the Ministers back. Then, from 2022, for the next couple of years, we had no Ministers again. There was nobody there to take any of those decisions. We had to take them during that time. That is what my colleague is referring to.

Now we have a Minister who is making priority decisions. He has put money into homelessness prevention. He has continued to safeguard the money that is there for Supporting People. In fairness, he has done that. I get the point that you are making about whether other priorities are as valuable to society as that one. That is a question that you can ask any Minister. That is a question that you need to ask the Minister directly. I cannot get inside his head to give you the specific answer on that, but he has a portfolio of things that he will need to do and wishes to do, and it is part of his mandate to do that.

Mr Gildernew: Thank you. As Chair of the Communities Committee, I will, once again, follow that up.

Finally, can you just give a brief answer to this question: could the increase in demand for homelessness services and the pressure on service providers have been avoided by a more sustained focus on early intervention and prevention?

Ms Long: That is a brilliant question. Fundamentally, yes. The earlier you can put money into prevention, the earlier you will see the impact. I do not think that, with the exception of the second shock, we could have prevented the first. It was pandemic-related. I spend a lot of time thinking, "What if?". I came into the organisation in April 2021, and I was very surprised by the lack of contingency accommodation. I remember one of my colleagues telling me that we had 36 units. I do not think that, at the time, we were prepared enough for a shock of that size, but nobody could ever have been prepared for going from 3,000 placements a year to 9,500, then 10,000 and then 11,000, and I do not think that any public purse would have allowed us to have contingency of that level.

The lesson that we should all learn, which we are putting in place now, is to have a steady, easy-to-access supply of temporary accommodation because economic cycles happen and shocks happen, and we did not have it at the time.

On top of that, prevention should always be a core part of how we provide public services in housing. There is a lesson for everybody in that, and I do not just mean Northern Ireland. I talk to housing professionals all over these islands, and we are all applying those lessons. Ironically, we are applying the same lessons that some of the older people in these types of jobs were learning 20 years ago. These things happen in cycles, and, having taken our eye off the prevention ball, we are now paying for it. As I say, that is beyond any of us in this room. However, if we can start to make structural and permanent changes to our housing system now, hopefully, whoever sits in this chair in 20 years' time will not be saying the same thing.

Mr Boyle: You also made the point about the perfect storm, about what was happening in the private rental sector as well, with its capacity dropping and the cost of renting going up as well. There are a lot of factors to this that will seriously test any prevention strategy to try to cope with the level of demand that was placed here. I do not think that it would have met it, and we had those conversations.

Ms Long: Yes. We have talked, today, mostly about the Housing Executive as the strategic housing authority, but we are also a landlord of 83,000 homes. As a landlord, we have been able to dial up two things: our tenancy sustainment — because we could not have a situation whereby we were losing our own tenants from our own properties and adding to the homelessness demand — and our financial inclusion work. We were able to do that through our rental income.

One of the things that I am proud of is that we pulled every possible lever available to us, and we have applied some of that learning. We now know the impact of financial inclusion. We know how much we need to put in to see the impacts, and that has been very helpful.

To come back to those three aspects of prevention, you must have universal prevention in your public services. Colum is absolutely right: we see it now in the Programme for Government, we need a mindset shift and ensure that we do not take our eye off that, and we must continue to fund it. That will really serve us well in the next few years.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Thank you, Colum and Grainia. OK, our Deputy Chair, Diane Forsythe?

Ms Forsythe: Thanks very much, Chair. Thank you for being here. Where we have strayed slightly into the political sphere, it is important to say that Minister Lyons has shown his commitment to addressing homelessness head-on and very strongly. He has been very clear in his message and has made clear his target to build more social homes, and if he had more budget, he would be doing that —

Mr Boyle: That is right; that is what he said.

Ms Forsythe: Absolutely. There is his commitment to securing the Supporting People budget and the prevention element of that.

Getting back to our focus in this Committee, the report and the questions to you, the officials, I want to speak a wee bit to outcome measurement. Previous reports that we have had on outcomes have been quite cross-cutting. You mentioned some of them today as well: we have had mental health, reducing adult reoffending, access to education and employment and benefits. All of those things are so cross-cutting, and this links quite closely into those. Where you spend money on preventing homelessness affects all of those different Departments, and that is really difficult, but important, to capture. Why has the homelessness prevention outcome measurement taken so long?

Ms Long: There are a number of helpful elements of the report in relation to sending us in a good direction on this. However, first, the homelessness strategy is unique. I have not seen a strategy developed quite like it. It was developed in a genuinely inclusive way. It was endorsed by the central homelessness forum, which is not just made up of the Housing Executive, although we do chair it and it is one of the key structures. It is made up of colleagues from the Department and from across the voluntary and community sector, so we jointly signed up to a strategy, which contains some really helpful language from Homeless Connect in demonstrating the inclusive nature of the strategy, and they strongly support it.

When we put the strategy together, we agreed strategic objectives and a set of actions, which we publish annually. Alongside that, there are indicators and outcomes. Those indicators should measure the extent to which we get those outcomes, but they are very long-term outcomes. There are things like the numbers of people presenting in the homelessness system and the numbers of placements in temporary accommodation, so they are very long-term outcomes.

When we put the documents together, we were clear. First of all, I remember jointly signing the foreword with the chair at the time, and we said in it that many things can happen in the life of the strategy, we do not know what they are yet, and therefore we will have annual action plans — and they will be annual — because, from time to time, we may need to change course. As I said, we then had to shift from prevention to delivering accommodation on a much greater level, and that had an impact.

To answer your question about outcomes, in writing the strategy, we were also clear that some of the baselines would not be in place from day 1, so there were two particular areas — baselines — in relation to chronic homelessness and baseline data in relation to prevention. We said that it would take us some time, which it has done, and the report sets that out, so that is the first reason. It is a strategy that is dynamic. There are annual action plans. We set the baseline data and indicators over time. When I look back at the way that the report treats and focuses on how we measure outcomes, I think that, to be frank, we could have made our lives easier had we picked outcomes that were much simpler. I do not think that the central homelessness forum would have signed off on that, therefore our outcomes are ambitious. They state that we will reduce the number of people who are presenting as homeless, and we have only just got there. I have to say to the Committee, as I have already said to you, Colum, that that may change next month or the month after that because we do not know the extent of the demand that is going to come at us. The rest of the outcomes are highly ambitious, so to get the strategy agreed it was entirely appropriate that we had long-term, high-level outcomes.

Understandably, the NIAO has said that we have not achieved those outcomes, but those outcomes are very long term, and I do not think that jurisdictions anywhere on these islands are meeting those. There are lessons for us. Should we have outcomes that are little less long-term and not so fundamental? Maybe. We have to go away now and think about that. What I do not want to do — and I think that the homelessness forum would not allow us to do this — would be to be less ambitious. That is the challenge. The Audit Office report is helpful. We now need go away now — and we set it out in our response — and think about how we make the distinction between our objectives and those actions plans, how we ensure that the outcomes are as linked as possible and maybe pull them a little closer in time and closer to reality without undermining our ambition.

Ms Forsythe: Thanks, Grainia. That is the second time that the Audit Office has recommended better outcomes data and measurement for homelessness services, having reported on that as far back as 2017. As we talk about reducing investment, do you think that by failing to measure those outcomes, we cannot prove what is working?

Ms Long: We have not failed to measure the outcomes. I think that the Audit Office said that we had not achieved on those outcomes. As I said, the numbers always speak for themselves in housing. We now need to be clearer in the outcomes and, maybe, bring them closer to where we are today and not so far away with regard to their achievement. I think the point you are referring to is the SMART-ness of some of our actions.

Where I disagree with the report is that it suggests that the actions that we set are not aligned with the objectives. I think that they are, and we set out pretty clearly that they are. They are public documents. We have annual action plans and progress reports. They are public, and I am very content with them. However, I accept that if there is confusion and the Audit Office found it difficult to work its way through the various actions, progress reports, indicators and outcomes, we need to sharpen that up and make it smarter. We set out in our response to the report how we will do that. We have put a series of measures in place, and we will have that done certainly by the end of this financial year. If it is not clear to people where we are making progress, it is in our interests to make sure that we are clear, so we are going to do that.

Mr Boyle: From our point of view, there is major value in the recommendation. The space is too cluttered. There are too many groups looking at different aspects that overlap. The terms of reference could be clearer in some of them. Some of that was in place before we had the shocks that Grainia referred to. We are in a different world with homelessness here. There needs to be greater simplicity and crispness, a greater ability to track it and greater longitudinal tracking, and it must be brought right back to the individual in a way that is doable from a data perspective.

We have had a clear discussion around the permanent secretary table on that. We see Justice already playing strongly into this, and it has been doing so for some time. We see Health coming to it boldly, which I am pleased to see. Education is good on the ground but strategically not as good as it needs to be, and I have had that discussion with Ronnie Armour. Changes need to be made to this, and we need to change ourselves. We need to bring extra value to make this a lot more digestible. If the Audit Office is asking us, "What's going on in the middle of all this? All we are getting is a lot of noise. We are not getting actual traction on what the situation actually is", then nobody is gaining from it. We need to bring greater clarity, focus and ability to test outcomes whether they be short- or longer-term.

Ms Forsythe: Absolutely. You capture it well. I chair the all-party group on voluntary and community sector. I know from speaking to that sector that, a lot of the time, when it gets funding, it is awarded to certain services that do a little bit of prevention on the side, which, as you said, is not being measured. There are a lot of things that you — the Department and the Housing Executive — are putting money into that you are not able to capture the outcome of because there are strands everywhere. I think that that is what you are saying.

Mr Boyle: Yes. My Department, Justice, Health and the Housing Executive work very closely together on young people leaving care, for example. That is a nugget that says to me, "We need to replicate this and do it in a different way". That is where we need to be.

Ms Long: We have also learned a lot about what we need in terms of better systems. Since 2022-23, we have had in place an agreed definition of what a prevention intervention looks like. That has been quite transformational. We put that in place in the Housing Executive for our housing advisory teams, our homelessness team and so on. We agreed that in partnership with the voluntary and community sector. We now have definition of what a prevention looks like that has been agreed between us and the partners that we fund. That means that, no matter who you are, if somebody intervenes, makes a decision and enables you through that action to prevent your homelessness, we track that and count it. We now have two years' worth of data, which will be really helpful because, first, it will show what works and the aggregate impact of all of that work, and, secondly, it will make it far easier for us to make the case for additional funding. That has been very helpful. We have moved ahead quite quickly from where we were when the Audit Office put together the report. I look forward to being able to report on progress, because we made significant progress very quickly.

The partnership with the voluntary and community sector is very important. The strategy was really lauded by the sector as being genuinely inclusive. Getting that balance between the reality of what we are going to do today and, ultimately, where we want to get to with that ambition will probably continue to be a bit of a natural, but healthy, tension.

Ms Forsythe: One of the success stories that is highlighted in the Audit Office report is the Complex Lives initiative. You mentioned it as well, Grainia. We have had a couple of detailed presentations on it. It is such an impressive project, with really easy-to-follow numbers that show that all of the different agencies, alongside the local council, have, by working together, been able to make such a difference to people's lives. It sometimes feels crude to translate it so directly into numbers, because it is actually about really transforming somebody's life and their outcomes.

My previous question was about how you are trying to say, "We need to spend more money on this, but we need to trace what the actual value is coming out the other side". Those involved in the Complex Lives initiative were able to quantify that, to a degree. One of the big hurdles was data sharing. It is my understanding that that worked quite well. How did you overcome that data-sharing hurdle, and how long did that take?

Ms Long: Colleagues in the voluntary sector will be watching this, and we will all be smiling at the same time. Frankly, the data-sharing hurdle nearly killed us all because it took us so long to get legal advice that allowed us to do it. We all sat in a room and eventually just agreed that we had to crack it. It took far too long, but it was worth it. We, as public officials, can now talk to others about how to do it.

Complex Lives is unique for a lot of reasons, one of which is that it is a co-funded project. It genuinely involves public bodies. The Housing Executive is the largest funder of Complex Lives, but we do not feel the need to chair the group; the group is chaired by Belfast City Council. That is genuine sharing. Often, when you are the biggest funder, you want to wade in and be in charge of everything. We have said, "No, we're going to put the money in because it's going to the right thing in the right place". It involves a group of strategic leaders, sitting around a table, who have taken risks on this. We have already shared some of that practice with other public bodies. We achieved data sharing through tenacity and agreeing that it was going to happen, no matter what. Every time that we received advice that said, "You can't do it", we said, "Well, why not? Tell us why not. What needs to change? What can we change? How can we, as organisations, do better?". There was quite a bit of risk-taking on the part of public officials.

Ms Forsythe: That is a good example of how, by taking those chances and cutting across the different silos in government, you can make a difference to people's lives. That project involves Belfast City Council because the city has very particular issues. When I heard more about it, I thought that it was difficult to see how it could translate to my area of South Down, which is a lot more rural, but there are definitely a lot of lessons to be learned.

As you say, you have shared data on aspects of that with other bodies. Could you do that formally? Is that in your plans? A theme in many of our reports is that good recommendations come from bodies and departments sharing information with each other.

Ms Long: Yes, very much so. In fact, I think it was at the NICON Conference — I can follow up with more detail — where a number of innovations across the public sector were discussed. Colleagues from Belfast City Council, the Housing Executive and other partners round the table have presented on that. We have certainly been happy to present to other public bodies on how to crack data sharing.

As public servants, we have talked a lot about how to take risks and do things that are difficult. Genuinely, for us, one of those things was setting the target on children in hotels and bed and breakfast accommodation. There was no law, policy, ministerial direction or ministerial priority requiring us to do that. We set the KPI in our business plan. I remember our previous director of housing, before he retired, saying to me, "You're going to be at the PAC some day. You'll not have hit that target, and they're going to ask why". I said, "Well, it's the right thing to do". Here we are at the PAC, and, although the Audit Office report says that we have not met it, since then, we have met it. However, even if we had not met it, it was still the right thing to do, because it changed the culture within our organisations, whereby everybody agreed that we would not place children in hotels and bed and breakfast accommodation. If I had that as a target set by the chief executive but it was not written somewhere, we would not have done it. It had to come to our audit and risk committee, our board and the Department. We are now at the point where we are meeting it. We might not meet it next month. It might be red next month, because it is a demand-led service. However, there is something for all of us to learn about how we allow public servants to take risks and do the right thing. When you get a red against a KPI, sometimes that is OK if it is driving the right culture in your organisation.

Mr Boyle: Place-based interventions are a fantastic way in which to try to do these things — to try them out, get all the organisations there, work out the data sharing and focus holistically on a particular area. We have seen it in that example, and it works really well. It is about being able to do more of that and having exemplars dotted throughout the Province, so that you can actually drive it out. That is a key piece of where we want to be with this.

Ms Forsythe: Absolutely. Thank you, both, very much.

Mr Boylan: You are very welcome. Catherine, you are not forgotten about, although you have not spoken.

Ms Catherine McFarland (Northern Ireland Housing Executive): That is OK.

Mr Boylan: You are still with us. It has been a good conversation, and thanks very much for your openness, robustness and frankness in the responses.

I am mindful of what the Committee is and what we are trying to do, but it is hard not to put on your Statutory Committee hat at times. Colum, you are right that there has to be learning from COVID as well. Besides all the things that you have said, it has been a challenging time across the board. I know that we keep talking about budgets and funding, but it was interesting that you said that we still have responsibilities — we still have Departments to run and jobs to do. The Committee has done a number of reports, and the general conversation is about Departments operating in silos. That is no secret. However, I take some encouragement from what you have said about the permanent secretaries meeting. I am not asking you to respond on the issue of silo mentality, but there seems to be a wee bit more positivity in that working relationship. Is that right?

Mr Boyle: Yes. The perm secs' group is really good. There is a desire to collaborate very strongly. Each perm sec has a Minister. Each is set up with an individual Department and ministry. On issues like homelessness, where we need to work across the boundaries, I have seen, over the past year or so, a different, more open dialogue. Mike Farrar has come in from GB, and he is so open to trying new things. He is bringing experience of what he has done elsewhere that has worked. He wants to see a lot more of the place-based stuff that I talked about earlier. He is saying, "Hands up. Look, we've been focused on the things that Health needs to focus on, from a statutory point of view. What you're asking us to do is find some resources to be able to reach out and do other things". Health is doing that, actually. He has involved the Chief Medical Officer in a bit of internal restructuring to help us do some of the stuff on homelessness that will be really beneficial. That is opening a great new door for us. That is the start of it. Permanent secretaries get together every Friday morning for a meeting that lasts two or three hours; where we get a lot of business done; and where there is a lot of collaboration and good development on certain things that we want to do. That is very positive for us. I take my hat off to Jayne Brady: she has catalysed that and made it happen.

Mr Boylan: I asked that in the context that, when we report, we will make a number of recommendations, and each will go to whoever has responsibility. We have listened. Part of members' questioning is, "Who is taking responsibility for what?", and it is about responsibility. I come back to the fact that all of us have collective responsibility. That is where we need to be with it. Diane is right, and fair play to her for giving South Down a wee mention in every Committee meeting. Bring it back to where we are at with it. It is important that we get as much information as we can to move forward.

I come to my questions. Grainia, you mentioned the £2·7 million allocation for strategic prevention. Will you detail exactly what that is for? Have you a robust mechanism or framework designed to measure its impact?

Ms McFarland: OK. Thank you.

Mr Boylan: Catherine, I called you out at the start. Fair play to you. [Laughter.]

Ms McFarland: I knew it was coming.

I will answer the first part of that question. We got £2·7 million for strategic prevention this year. Some £200,000 of that was for New Foundations, which, as members will know, is centred around young people leaving care. That £2·7 million also funds the Complex Lives initiative that we have talked about. It funds Housing First, which is another model that has had some success. It funds some of the financial inclusion work that Grainia mentioned. The fund gives money to our custodial housing pilot. We also have a prevention fund, to which organisations can apply. They will outline their proposals to deliver prevention measures. Those will be assessed, and a decision will be made on what funding each of those proposals will get, based on what they will deliver. I know that it is a relatively small amount of money, however there are key projects in there.

As to outcomes —.

Ms Long: I can touch on that. The difference between how we are spending that strategic prevention programme money this time round, compared to the previous time, is that it has very much been driven by evidence from what has worked not just in Northern Ireland but beyond it. Catherine listed a very targeted set of interventions. For example, from Complex Lives, we have learned of the need for intervention for people who are chronically homeless. In particular, there is a group of women who have been — to use that awful phrase — "in the system" for a long time. We now know the interventions that help, and we want to fund those specifically. We also know that domestic violence needs a lot of focus, and New Foundations is for young people who, because of their age, are moving out of the care system. In the past, the strategic prevention money was more generic. It is much more targeted and specific now, which is really good. It allows us to measure its success.

As to the second half of your question, on the outcomes, that is where the definition of prevention that I talked about applies. We now have that agreed, and that work has been under way for the past couple of years. Everybody who provides those services must submit, as they always have done, returns, evidence and data to us. We then pull that together. The difference now is that we are developing a system to pull together aggregated data. It will be ready by June next year, and that is in the action plan that we submitted in response to the Audit Office report. It will give us an ICT platform through which we can gather that information. We will have the same set of data, measured in the same way, for all those interventions. Therefore, we will be able to say, "OK. That worked; that didn't work as well; that worked, and we need to dial it up". That will allow us to know where we can best spend to extract the most value for public money.

Mr Boylan: Thank you. My next question follows on nicely. Clearly, this is pot of money has to be spent by 2026. That seems rather short term, although it is called "strategic prevention". There is a lot of learning to be applied. What plans does the Department have to invest in prevention initiatives that merit longer-term support?

Mr Boyle: I will bring Paul in in a second, but I will just say that Grainia does not have to go through me to get to the Minister. She and the Department's housing professionals meet the Minister regularly on housing. The Minister wants to understand what is happening with housing on the ground, as well as with homelessness prevention and all the rest of that. He gets all of that directly from them, and we give him advice.

On pitching for budgets for the next three years, as I said earlier, this is the first time that we have had a proper budget set down. Although it is relatively small, it has been well used, and there is a level of piloting in and around that. The ongoing dialogue that we are having with the Housing Executive, which has allowed us to focus on the evidence and proof of what works, means that we are making a really good case. We are very positive about the funding for that going forward. It is not just a case of, "Let's see how this goes". We know, from speaking to housing professionals, that homelessness prevention works, but we want to make sure that we get the right blend of homelessness prevention and that we are backing winners. If that works better, who knows? We could make more money available, depending on how the budgetary process runs for us.

Mr Price: Everything that Grainia talked about will put us in a place where we can make stronger bids for increased homelessness prevention funding. The only dimension that I will add to what Colum said is that that argument will always be competing with the funding that is compelled by the statutory duty as we currently have it. What we also need to do, perhaps, subject to the Minister's approval, is have a conversation about whether we need to give ourselves a statutory duty to fund prevention that competes with the current statutory duty to fund temporary accommodation.

Mr Boylan: I agree. I will finish on this point. It is interesting. We are here to challenge on value for money. Smaller amounts of money may be able to do greater things.

Mr Boyle: Absolutely.

Mr Boylan: It is about working in partnership. If we do not get that right, even across Departments —. Each Minister has the autonomy to do whatever — I cannot argue about that. That is where we are at with it.

I want to pick up on one other point. Colm asked a question about the right-to-buy scheme. I will not get into the arguments about an individual's rights, but is that part of the conversation on those changes? Can you comment on an individual's right to buy? Is that a part of the conversation? We are talking about it from a housing stock point of view and the stock being lower. I am coming at it from a different angle. I will just throw that out there as part of the argument.

Mr Price: The facts are that, in any typical year, the Housing Executive will sell off between 300 and 400 homes.

Ms Long: It is closer to 400.

Mr Price: It is having that material effect on supply every year. In every typical year, we will also complete around 1,600 new social homes — housing association homes. There is a constant netting effect of sales on new supply. That is a fact. Does that answer your question? Those are the facts of the issue.

Mr Boylan: I know about that side of it. I am coming at it from the angle of an individual's right to buy a house. Is their entitlement a part of the conversation?

Mr Boyle: There is a fundamental belief in that right. There is no doubt about that. That is part of it, yes.

Mr Price: Those are the two sides of the debate: there are those against, who make the supply side argument; and there are those for, who maintain —.

Mr Boyle: That is my assessment of that position, yes.

Mr Boylan: I strayed slightly there, Chair. Thank you.

Mr Dunne: Thank you, folks, for your detailed presentation and answers. I want to go back to temporary accommodation, which is a significant issue. I appreciate that demand for that has soared since COVID, as has been outlined. It is fair to say, however, that some of the figures are truly staggering. The cost amounted to £8 million in 2018-19, but, six or seven years later, it is now over £40 million. That is a significant amount, even factoring in the increases in the cost of living and inflation over that period. We are keen to see what is being done to reduce reliance and expenditure on non-standard accommodation such as hotels and B&Bs, which is spiralling. The bills for that are staggering.

Mr Boyle: We spoke earlier about the Executive having a strategy. That is starting to crest a wee bit, so we are getting to grips with it. Grainia, do you want to describe how that is happening?

Ms Long: Yes, thank you. For context, I will say that, although we have certainly seen a significant growth in temporary accommodation use in Northern Ireland, it is proportionately lower than in other UK regions: it is roughly equivalent to 270 households per 100,000 of population. The figure is broadly in line with Scotland, and it is below that of the English local authorities and the big cities. I absolutely agree that they are staggering numbers. I would not want anybody to think that we, as housing professionals, are not always shocked by them. Non-standard accommodation, such as hotels and bed and breakfasts, currently makes up between 9% and 10% of overall temporary accommodation, but they can be six and a half or seven times more expensive than other types of temporary accommodation, such as single lets.

In our overall portfolio, we want as much single-let accommodation as possible. We need a stable supply of single-let accommodation, particularly a block booking for which we have negotiated a fixed rate, so that there is stability over a period. Where we have leases that go beyond 12 months, those are capitalised, which gives us more of a mixed economy of capital and revenue funding, and, from a finance point of view, helps us with long-term investment. All of our work to date has been about ensuring that we are ahead of the curve in having a stable and steady supply of temporary accommodation that provides value for money. As Colum said, we have arrived at a point where the financial envelope is beginning to stabilise; it is less volatile than it was. We can come on to that.

As regards where we go from here, a really important aspect is the fact that the Housing Executive has received departmental approval to acquire temporary accommodation. I mentioned that, when I joined the organisation, I was taken aback by the fact that the Housing Executive, as a landlord and the strategic housing authority, did not have its own supply of accommodation that it could retain as temporary accommodation. We have received approval to acquire 600 homes. The intention is that the homes will be acquired by the Housing Executive over the next three years: 100 next year, then 200, and then 300. They are for temporary accommodation use, and we expect that to be the case in the medium term. What is extraordinary about that is that we will acquire those properties from our own rental income reserve. That shows how seriously we take the issue. We are very pleased that the Department has agreed to that. We will retain those 600 homes as temporary accommodation. That is a very important aspect that will, in response to your question, reduce our reliance on volatile forms of temporary accommodation as we move to more stable forms. It is a very important next step for us.

Mr Price: That will save significant amounts of money over the next few years. Some of the criticisms about governance in the report are valuable and fair. However, in recent years, the Department's oversight of the Housing Executive has been particularly focused on how we can get greater control over the spending, increase use of the less expensive forms of accommodation and reduce reliance on the more expensive forms. There has been real success in that area. We have gone through every penny spent by the Housing Executive to assure ourselves on that point. The net spend is cresting: that is the point. The numbers are going up, and we really need to keep working on the people story. However, budgetary management is improving all the time, even while the numbers increase.

Mr Dunne: That is good. Is the value for money framework for temporary accommodation now in place?

Ms Long: Yes. That is a piece of work that we commissioned from the Centre for Homelessness Impact, which works across the UK on what works. It will come in, look at a key area of public service and find ways in which to increase value for money. We have always been very impressed by that organisation, so we asked it to come in and look at the Housing Executive. The Centre for Homelessness Impact mapped all our processes and systems for onboarding temporary accommodation: what is spent, how it is spent, the data and so on. It came up with a number of recommendations to enable us to improve the value for money of our approach, and we have improved our approach in a number of ways. The Audit Office's report also helped us to formalise some of our procedures on how we bring on and apply controls on use of non-standard accommodation, such as hotels. We have now put those in place, and those were approved last month.

We are ahead of our action plans on non-standard accommodation and temporary accommodation. The measure of that — I am looking at some of the numbers — is that, in 18 months, we have gone from not using any houses in multiple occupation — HMOs — to now having more than 100. Despite the market, and despite the budget that we have, we have been to be able to go from a standing start to now having a steady supply of houses in multiple occupation; our current portfolio contains 125 HMOs. That will give us real stability. That is 125 hotel rooms that we are not using. It is the point that Catherine keeps reminding me about: we have baked efficiency into the system. Last year, we brought on an additional 361 units of single lets. In the first six months of this year, we secured 352. Every year in which we do that, we get better at it. As I said, we have more of a sense of what is out there in the market. However, I have to say this: I did not really ever think that I would see the day that the Housing Executive would need a portfolio of 5,000 units. We are the strategic housing authority and a public landlord. I now have a team of people who understand the private rented market and are out there negotiating with landlords and applying the controls that Catherine applies. We report that to our audit and risk board. That is a whole new area of work that we have had to put in place.

Mr Boyle: It was totally unanticipated.

Ms Long: Absolutely. It has all happened in the past number of years. It is about rent collection and a lot of other aspects. However, that is what other public authorities are doing. We talk to all of our peers across the other jurisdictions. It is absolutely right and proper that the Department, our board and audit committee and, of course, the NIAO all want to look at the controls that we have applied. The report has been very helpful.

Mr Boyle: I have made this point already, but I will make it again because the Housing Executive will not make it itself: unlike many other authorities, such as those in Scotland and England, the Housing Executive has met its statutory obligations while living within its means. There are oodles of examples from across England, including London, and Scotland of where that has not happened. We are talking about value for money. Although the cost of what it did was extremely high — eye-watering — and as bad as the situation is, the Housing Executive delivered when it needed to in a crisis. That really needs to be acknowledged. It is really important.

Mr Dunne: Finally, could that value-for-money framework have been put in place any earlier, so that that money could have been used more on prevention and so on? On reflection, could it have been?

Ms Long: We are hard on ourselves, as we should be. We set targets for ourselves, and we have asked ourselves the same question. As I said, over the past number of years, we have added thousands of additional people living in temporary accommodation. We have put in place many controls and procedures, and we have negotiated with landlords in areas. We have never before needed temporary accommodation across all 11 council areas. I present to all councils once a year through our housing investment plan. You will know that we now have temporary accommodation in every council area. We have done all of that and more with 69 additional staff. The answer to your question is that we could not have done it earlier, because we simply did not have the people, the time or the resource to do so. As I said, we did that proactively anyway through our work with the Centre for Homelessness Impact, but we were not in a place to do that earlier.

Ms McFarland: You talk about value for money. I will outline our general approach in how we manage our budget. Going back a number of years, not just in recent times, there have been shocks that have changed homelessness. We have learned, grown and developed our processes, systems and people to manage that change. That has definitely had value-for-money benefits. It is not about just the direct costs that are involved in temporary accommodation, where we have made significant savings over the past three years, which I can outline for you. It is also about the fact that, every year, we go to the Department and start our budgeting process a full year before it is due. We look at everything that we have learned across the organisation. We look at how we deliver our services, and at the efficiency savings that we can make. We then look at how we can feed those in, so that we take money away from the things that manage and operate the services in the background and push it towards the front line. We break that down every single year and more or less start from scratch to look at what we need, how we deliver our services and the changes that we can make, such as whether we can make more use of IT or whether we need all of our accommodation. We build up that budget from scratch.

Therefore, we have made significant savings across the organisation, which feed into the cost of managing the organisation, including as regards homelessness. There is not just a direct cost; there is also an indirect cost, and we have made indirect savings over the past number of years. Those are fully documented and outlined. We report those through our executive teams and to the Department, saying, "Here are the savings that we are making year-on-year, including direct savings on temporary accommodation". We take that approach very seriously. As Grainia said at the start, it is really important to us that there is value for money for the public purse across the board.

Mr Price: Your question is exactly the oversight question that I have been asking on Colum's behalf and at his direction over the years in question. We have been asking that not just because of some academic interest in VFM, but because our budget, as well as that of the Housing Executive, was being challenged, so we would have to take risks to fund the pressures presented by non-standard accommodation, and those risks would be permissible only if we bottomed them out and were sure that, while it was an emergency response, we were responding in the best or only value-for-money way. Eventually, after going through everything and not being at all cosy about it, I was satisfied that there was no better value-for-money way to respond. That is where we got to eventually.

Mr Dunne: OK. Thanks, folks.

Mr Burrows: You kind of answered my first question, which is about the 600 houses. Whereabouts are they and what is the timescale for acquiring them?

Ms Long: We are in the process of finalising the go-live date. To reach 600 properties, we will acquire 100 in the next financial year, 200 in the following financial year and 300 in year 3. They will be in the areas where there is greatest need for temporary accommodation — that is where we will start. We will want to have a good spread across as many council areas as possible. The process will be dictated by what is good value in the marketplace, and we will be looking for properties for which significant upfront investment is not required. We will bring those on using our change of tenancy works — there will be a small amount of work done to the properties. As I said, the go-live date will be next year, but they will make a significant difference and will, I hope, move us beyond hotel use, or as close as possible to being out of hotel use.

Mr Burrows: I was interested in the comments that you made about the Minister bringing extra focus, determination, demands and action. Has not having had an Executive for two periods set back progress on our homelessness strategy, and do we, therefore, have more homelessness than we might have had?

Mr Boyle: No, there is just a different level of bandwidth. When there is no Minister in place, the response from officials has to be to keep things running as they need to run. I think that there is less —.

Mr Burrows: The answer, therefore, is? Has having no Minister over those two periods made a difference?

Mr Boyle: Of course it has made a difference: it has made it much more difficult. It is much easier when there is a Minister who is saying, "These are my priorities. This is where I want to focus. This is what I want to do. These are the outcomes that I want". Once we hear that, we can get in behind that without any difficulty, whereas, whenever we are working without a Minister in place, our powers are limited: we are told to keep the lights on and the heat running. Basically, there were long periods when we could not do anything new. That was very difficult, particularly when things were happening that required decisions to be made — there were lots of legal issues during that time. It is much, much easier when Ministers are in place.

Mr Burrows: I think that everyone is a convert to the theory of prevention. It is cheaper, and there is less trauma. However, since I have been in the public sector — for the past 20, 25, 26 or 27 years — I have heard, "Next year, we're going to try to get on to prevention, not firefighting", but it never actually happens. I accept that there is an issue with funding, but is that a golden thread that goes through the culture and leadership focus in everything you do? If someone were to do a deep dive into agendas and meetings and to speak to people in the corridor to ask what is actually being done about prevention, would they find that that is operationalised in any sense? Would they find that that is a core piece of work?

Mr Price: There is a really good example that shows that it is working. This report points out that, since the previous report, unlike anywhere else in the UK, the numbers of those who present and are then assessed as full duty applicants under the homelessness duty have fallen in Northern Ireland. They have fallen marginally, but they have fallen. Relative to what has happened in the rest of the UK, even a flat profile is quite a story.

That is to do with the big, strategic prevention decisions that have been taken consistently over the past 10 years, by Ministers, when they were there, and officials maintaining the footprint of their decisions, which is, at the very least, to protect Supporting People and to continue investment in new social housing building. We might get on to the frustrations with the extent of new social housing builds, but the comparison with the rate of new builds in other parts of the UK is really positive. It constantly maintains the ability to allocate, take people off the list and take people out of temporary accommodation, and we have also maintained Supporting People. Those things have not happened in the rest of the UK. In addition to having the temporary accommodation problem that we have, they have a rising demand of presenters and those assessed as FDA. We have done that, and it is a success that the report points out. It is to do with maintaining those two really big budgets over the long term.

Mr Boyle: On the issue of people with mental health conditions and the complexity of that, you talked about your front-line staff having to deal with homelessness now and the way it presents and having to deal with a much higher level of complexity than ever before and higher volumes. You are going to have to invest in prevention to give yourself a chance to actually deal with what is coming, because, if you do not, it will just get bigger and bigger. In some senses, that can sometimes lead you to a situation where you almost feel as though you are running to stand still, but it is the best option that I can see. Given the research that I have seen on it, it is the best option that I have seen. Having seen some of the things in Supporting People and having visited some of those to see the work that they do and the difference that it makes, I say that it is incredible. The other bit that is of interest to me and that was asked about in the question is, when you look at a family breakdown, how prevention can happen early enough. You have that with your financial officers, as well, Grainia.

Ms Long: Yes; financial inclusion.

Mr Boyle: You might want to share a bit about that, because that is pertinent to the question.

Ms Long: Yes. The Housing Executive is, for the purposes of its budget, two separate organisations. Sometimes, we can keep those two too separate, but the best way for me to tell you about the culture of the organisation is this: if you went into one of our area offices on a Monday morning, you would find my colleagues standing around a screen — some of them are whiteboards, and some of them are computer screens — looking at the numbers of people who are coming into the office, because Monday mornings are very busy in any public service, or the number of families or households that are in hotels or temporary accommodation. The local team — the patch managers — will be sitting or standing alongside our homelessness officers, looking at how to find housing solutions for them. When we meet colleagues from outside Northern Ireland, they say to us that it must be great having a strategic housing authority that is also a public landlord, because we are able to do both. We have housing officers from the landlord working with housing advisers and the central homelessness team. That is probably the best descriptor of how you get a culture of prevention.

Mr Burrows: It is about prevention shifting left. How much effort is put into shifting left so that the very earliest risk factor can be identified? Is there a spectrum where you see the earliest point that someone is indicating a risk that they might end up homeless, and then, at the other end of the spectrum, a person is imminently going to be homeless, whether it is through missed rent payments, addictions or domestic violence? That is what I am trying to get to. Before someone comes through the door, how do we actually prevent it? For example, if someone is being released from prison in three months, and they have no address to be released to, when does work start on that? I know that it is for Probation Service and all sorts of others, but where is the link?

Ms Long: Absolutely. That is our custodial housing adviser project. That work came about through the central homelessness forum, which is one of the structures that we have in place and which my colleague chairs in the Housing Executive. The Department of Justice came to us around that table and asked whether we could help because too many people are leaving prison without a housing solution. We have funded the co-location of housing advisers in prison to enable that to happen. We are just through that strategic prevention programme. We are now able to scale that up, and we have made the decision to fund beyond one prison into three prisons, or it could be four. That is exactly why we have a strategic prevention programme.

Mr Boyle: We join up with that, Jon, because our work coaches are in there as well, as are our Make the Call staff. We joined forces to make sure that there is a holistic response. Not only do they have a roof over their head, but they have an option for a job and know what benefits they are entitled to. There should be a warm handover; when they go to one of our jobs and benefits offices, they should be able to see someone whom they have seen before. That is what we were endeavouring to do.

Mr Burrows: OK. That is good.

There are two other things. One is around domestic violence. Where you have a couple who are in a home, and, let us say that there are children and that the perpetrator is male, which 90% are, and the victim is female, which 90% are, and they are in a joint tenancy situation, as it stands in the law, if there is domestic violence, the man has as much right as the woman to stay in that house. Is that right?

Ms Long: I will follow up on that. I am always careful about what I say without knowing 100%, so I will follow up on that in writing to the Committee.

When you talked about prevention upstream, my next comment was going to be about domestic violence. Again, it is about having a strategic housing authority and a landlord working together. We have put together a domestic violence action plan, and we called it a plan because we have had enough with strategies. The plan is very clearly focused on how we prevent homelessness due to violence; in particular, violence against women and girls, aligning what we do with the ending violence against women and girls strategy.

In every situation, where we can, we want the woman and her children to be able to stay in the home. Therefore, we now have a sanctuary scheme where we will provide physical adaptations to that property to keep that woman and her children secure. That has been very successful, and we are very pleased. We are having conversations with some of our partners in housing associations about potentially rolling that out. The sanctuary scheme has been really important.

I will come back to you about the tenancy issue, because I do not want to give the wrong advice in relation to that.

Mr Burrows: I know some women who have ended up homeless because they had no choice. They either leave because the husband or partner will not leave, or they stay in their home and get battered because the choice of leaving means that they will be homeless.

I am aware of the sanctuary scheme. I have asked people about it, and some are not aware of it. Is there an awareness programme for it?

Ms Long: Yes, there is. It is available to our tenants. The Housing Executive landlord pays for that through rental income for its own tenants. We raise awareness through our tenants' magazine and so on.

Through the Supporting People programme, we are the largest provider and funder of accommodation-based services for people who are fleeing domestic violence. Again, that is mainly women. We work very closely with Women's Aid and the Women's Aid network and a range of organisations. For those women and children who move — let us be clear: we do not want anyone to have to move — it is a cause of homelessness. I will be very clear about that. Funding needs to be available, and services are available. That is what we fund through Supporting People, but, as a landlord —.

Mr Burrows: I have one last question.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): We need to get back to the report.

Mr Burrows: Sorry. Just on that, prevention of homelessness is the key. On that final point, for the record, if organisations, such as Women's Aid, cannot deal with complex needs — I am told that it cannot — women who are victims of domestic violence are often not accepted by Women's Aid because it cannot deal with complex needs, which causes homelessness. That is just on the prevention theme.

Ms Long: I am very happy to come back directly to you on that.

Ms Forsythe: You are working closely with Women's Aid on domestic and sexual violence. A lot of Women's Aid groups are working closely with the Complex Lives initiative, and others are keen to develop that. There is a lot of work going on in that space, so I do not want there to be a perception that Women's Aid cannot deal with complex needs.

Mr Honeyford: I will come back to the report. Looking at the supply and delivery into the future, the strategic ambition is to have 2,200 new social homes in a year, and we are seeing only about 1,000 starts this year. What plans are in place to meet that target?

Mr Boyle: Our housing supply strategy went to the Executive and was agreed, and the right direction of travel is very clear. As I said earlier, the Executive have the very difficult task of saying, "Here is the amount of money that we have in the block grant, and here is how we need to carve that up against all the requirements". We know from the commissioning prospectus what we need. That goes through the bid process. We made the bid accordingly, and it has fallen short. We do not sit on our hands and say, "OK, that's it". There are other things that we are going to try to do. I will bring in Paul to describe some of the additional things that we are trying to do to compensate for that going forward.

Mr Price: The Minister's recent announcement is the first instalment of the plan. We are going to try to stretch the grant. We are not just going to sit there and make ever-hopeful bids for what is actually a flat capital outlook over the next four years. That would be no plan, so we are going to try to stretch the grant. The Minister announced two reviews at the same point. One of them is a review of the grant methodologies for how we subsidise social housing. It will particularly look at how we get sources of finance other than capital DEL to put into social housing. Over the next four years, the capital outlook is flat, but the outlook for financial transactions capital (FTC) is not. It increases by about 100%. We are being told to do this. We are being told to find other sources of capital by that profile, so the review will get into that.

Beyond that, the housing supply strategy is about interventions beyond the social sector and developing a range of products beyond the social sector, which we are already trying to do. We have 9,000 homes delivered under the co-ownership scheme to date. Over the next four years, there will be another 4,000, spending about £153 million of financial transactions capital. We have a new intermediate rent product that will be rolled out shortly and that will deliver its first 300 homes. We have all the efforts that have been made in the mandate to this point and that are still to come in the rest of the mandate to improve and make better and more sustainable the quality of the private rented sector, which has, as the report makes clear, gone through such a convulsion in the past five or six years.

The short answer and summary of all that is that the housing supply strategy aims to deliver 100,000 homes over the next 15 years, a third of which should be social.

Mr Honeyford: A third are to be social, was it?

Mr Price: That is what we are pitching for.

Mr Boyle: Thirty-three thousand are to be social.

Mr Honeyford: The ambition to reach that is still there. That is what I am getting at. There is no point in having a target if we are never going to get near that target, so the ambition is still there. What is the impact of the shortfall in the short term?

Mr Price: The Programme for Government contains, if you like, an instalment of that 33,000. I think that that governs the thinking there. It has a target of 5,850. If we remain on the budget that we have in 2025-26 of £177 million, by the end of year 2 of that three-year target, we will have about 2,600. So, we will be about 3,200 short, requiring those in the final year. That will be an enormous challenge. The immediate Programme for Government target is very challenging right now. Let us see what we get in the monitoring round. The important thing is to remain focused on the 15-year, long-term plan, which is always what it was going to take. It was always going to take a pretty complete rethink of how we fund social housing and how we intervene beyond that. That is what we are working on.

Mr Honeyford: Is the shortfall down to a lack of funding, solely?

Mr Price: Every year, we ask for as much as the new social housing development programme can spend. Every year, the Department of Finance gives us as much as it can in response in the face of competing priorities. Every year, we take that money and start as many homes as we possibly can with that budget.

Mr Boyle: In the meantime, we bid like crazy.

Mr Honeyford: If the Minister is successful and has full funding for 2,200 homes, he is written a cheque and told, "There you go". Can you then deliver 2,200 homes?

Mr Price: We have done. It would be pretty close to the maximum number that the programme has ever delivered, but it has delivered 2,400 in one year.

Mr Honeyford: It is achievable.

Mr Price: We need to be stretching the capacity of the programme, and that is really clear. Its existing capacity also needs to be challenged over the 15 years. That is really important. Thirty-three thousand is a yearly average of 2,500 over 15 years, so, if we have a slow start, we are going to need to get up to 3,000. We accept that.

Mr Honeyford: If funding is there, are there other barriers such as waste water, planning, land and all of that?

Mr Price: For the 2,200, speaking broadly, I think that we would be OK. Year-on-year and as we need to increase the number, the barriers of waste water infrastructure, planning delays and so on will need to be addressed.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Before I allow Tom and Pádraig to come in, I want to raise a couple of things. Throughout the line of questioning, you have repeated the claim that there have been major organisational savings. That is all fair and good. Where has the money gone? Why has none of it been reallocated towards prevention?

Ms Long: The savings are £13·8 million. The savings are on the basis that we have used more sustainable forms of temporary accommodation than the alternative. That would not have been available to us. That is a saving in the bid that we made, essentially. If we had not done that, in order to meet our legal obligation, we would have had to bid for an additional £13·8 million over those three years. Therefore, the saving is in the bid that we would have made.

Mr Price: That is a really important part of balancing the Department's budget. That is where you see it.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Out of that saving, which has come up as a theme throughout, there is not a single pound for prevention. That is the root problem. I do not understand how you will cure the problem if you are not looking at prevention.

Mr Price: had an imbalance. It was not spending power. It was needed to stop the Department busting its budget.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): It was being spent anyway.

Mr Price: No. The funding requirement that the Housing Executive would have placed on us would have been that amount greater, and we would have struggled to fund it.

Mr Boyle: What we are saying is that it has been efficient at what it was doing.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Yes, so you are saying that there was an overspend, and you have curtailed it. Is that what you are saying? Can you explain that again? I am focused on the savings that you have talked about the whole way through the meeting.

Ms Long: In 2022 —.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): What is the benefit of those savings?

Ms Long: My view is the same as it was. In 2022-23, by using the Housing Executive's own domestic voids as disperse hostels, we saved £2·7 million. Through that, along with a number of other, much smaller things, we saved £4·5 million. In 2024-25, we saved £6·6 million, but that was also added to by, for example, now having HMOs and the implementation of the houses in multiple occupation model. That led us to a total of £13·8 million that we would otherwise have spent.

Mr Boyle: You have less of a funding requirement than if you had been using non-standard accommodation.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): I cannot hear.

Mr Boyle: There is less of a funding requirement as a consequence. That is the point.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): There is no benefit to the saving, then, if it is not going back into prevention, really.

Mr Boylan: It is savings.

Mr Boyle: Well, it is savings. It does not necessarily have to go back —.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): It is not solving the problem of homelessness.

Ms Long: I am not making that case. The case that I am making is that we did not have to spend £13·8 million on homelessness. We were able to ask for less money from the Department.

Mr Boyle: You have reduced your temporary accommodation spend.

Ms Long: Yes.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): OK.

Ms McFarland: Maybe I could just explain. We do not get a full allocation at the start of the year. We are dependent on monitoring rounds. As we move through the year and make those savings, those are taken into account when we resubmit our bids at the time of the monitoring round. Therefore, we do not actually get a full allocation at the start of the year and save £13 million, or whatever the savings are. We do not have a full budget from which we save that money. We will be funded for less as we go through the year; then we will ask for additional funding. Those savings are taken into consideration as we work our way through that financial year until we get to year end. The Department then uses that to build into its overall financial allocations. At the start of the year, there may be over-planning. As we move through the year and make those savings, that will all be taken into consideration in the round through our bids for monitoring rounds.

Mr Boyle: They are responding to what we are asking them to do, which is to bring down the cost of temporary accommodation and put in place something that is sustainable.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Yes, which the starting funds were going towards. The Department was content enough to fund the care, but not the cure.

Mr Price: The list of things that we cut, which I gave earlier, would have been longer if they had not made those savings. In that particular case, that list would have lengthened into us having had nowhere else to go than to look at the protection on Supporting People, for instance. If you are asking where the benefit is, there is one example. One thing that has really supported that really important protection on Supporting People, which has been maintained through these very difficult years, has been the savings that have been delivered by the Housing Executive through temporary accommodation.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): I think that the chief executive is being very gracious towards the Department, to be honest. There is a very clear problem. No investment in prevention has been made, yet savings have been made; in my view, that has directly contributed to the rising levels of homelessness. What is the Department going to do about that? I know what the Housing Executive wants to do about it. How will the Department ensure that the Housing Executive is properly resourced and funded?

Mr Boyle: To answer your question, the Housing Executive did not have enough money to fund Supporting People in 2022-23. We stepped in to fund that and, as I said, to put extra money into homelessness prevention.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): How much, Colum?

Mr Boyle: It was about —.

Mr Price: It was £600 million in 2022-23.

Mr Boyle: We did that, and we are proud that we did it. It was entirely the right thing to do. We have protected Supporting People the whole way through, and our Minister has done so since. We are not out of the woods yet, though we are starting to come out of that phase now with temporary accommodation. The report was about the spend on temporary accommodation. The idea that our Minister is not putting anything into homelessness prevention is wrong, because he is. He does that through Supporting People, and he put an extra pot of money in place, small though it is. He has done that.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): How is that being properly measured to ensure that the money is being spent well and that it leads to prevention?

Mr Boyle: It goes back to the earlier question that your colleague asked. We are looking for a longitudinal view to see how well prevention works on the ground.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): How far into that process are you?

Ms Long: We have been doing that since 2022-23. We put in place the definition of "homelessness prevention". It is about asking, "What types of interventions count as being specifically upstream prevention measures?". That is now locked into our systems, and we agreed with the voluntary and community sector partners that we fund that they will submit returns. We now have all that data. We are in that process, and, between March and September of next year, we will have an ICT platform that enables all that data to tell us the overall aggregate story of which interventions work well and which ones work less well. As I said, that will allow us to put our best foot forward in making future bids on prevention.

It will also give us a genuine opportunity to think about where we made interventions in particular cohorts of people, which interventions we scale up and do more of and where should we intervene in different ways with other groups, such as young people who age out of the care system. We in the public sector have never really cracked the corporate parent role that public officials have in ensuring that, when young people age out of the care system on their eighteenth birthday and move beyond social services and Health into housing and other public services, we prevent their homelessness.

Mr Boyle: It is not an either/or question for us: it is both. There was a stage at which we had to put everything into the statutory piece on temporary accommodation. Now, as we come out of that, we see more of an opportunity to blend prevention with what happens with temporary accommodation, because you are putting in place a much more affordable configuration of what temporary accommodation should be, and prevention goes alongside that. That is the key to it. It comes back to Jon's question. Do we really know how well we are doing prevention? Do we know what the quality of it is? The only way that we can do that is to put in place the right measures, and we have not had that in place well enough for long enough.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): I am looking at the bare facts of the whole situation. Temporary accommodation is the treatment for the problem. The cure, however, is investment in prevention. The Department is happy to take the sticking-plaster approach over implementing something that will prevent the problem. That is an issue. Are figures on homelessness in Northern Ireland going up?

Ms Long: Presentations are down. We are the only jurisdiction —.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Very slightly?

Ms Long: It has been flat for a number of years.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Static probably.

Ms Long: The Audit Office report says that it has come down, and it has come down.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Has the amount of money that has been invested in prevention gone down?

Ms Long: I would say up, because when you take Supporting People funding —.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Prevention money has increased, but levels of homelessness are static.

Ms Long: Homelessness presentations have been static, and they have come down. They have been static since COVID, but, previous to that, homelessness presentations had come down. It is very important that you ask the question about how much of an impact prevention is having on presentations. We are, however, talking about two completely different cycles now, to be fair. You are going into a pandemic with a certain number. We have had three shocks since then.

I will go back to the previous point, having been accused of being kind to the Department. There is a slightly separate issue here, in my understanding. We went through very rigorous budget processes in 2022-23 and, particularly, in 2023-24. Catherine and I met departmental officials over many hours in many weeks where we looked at every line in our budget many times. My view on this — I disagree slightly with Colum — is that the Department held off on funding vacancies in the Department in order to enable us to put money into front-line services. I said that publicly, and that was the right decision. I would have said it if I felt that it was the wrong decision. I also think that it was right that the Department funded Supporting People, but that is the Department's programme, so it should have done that. I am being challenging as well as being kind, I guess.

That year was a really tough year for everybody. In all of that, we were also concerned about how we fund the voluntary and community sector organisations that are providing those services to the people who need them most. Whatever way you look at it, there has not been enough revenue or capital subsidy. I am really pleased with the figure of £13·8 million. That will go up; it is on a trajectory to go up this year.

Ms McFarland: Yes, it is on its way up.

Ms Long: To challenge back, if I may, the cure is social housing. It is also prevention, but it is about social housing at scale, relentlessly, for 15 years. Alongside that, it is about affordable, intermediate housing. You have seen the numbers. We do our 15-year housing market assessment, which informs the housing supply strategy and all the local development plans. Ironically — this is a strange thing for the chief executive of the Housing Executive to say — if we focus only on social housing, all that it does is to put more pressure on the social housing waiting list. We have to have other options.

Intermediate housing — key-worker housing, if you want to call it that — can provide a solution for working people who are on low incomes and will never have the points to get social housing but could afford something at 80% market rate or shared ownership. That is what other jurisdictions do, and we have to do it. We have never cracked that. A 300-home pilot is very important, but we have to learn lessons from that really fast, and we have to go so fast beyond 300 homes in the next 10 to 15 years. We will never get the waiting list figures truly down if we do not have other choices for people beyond social housing. That does not mean that we should not have social housing as a solution. The numbers are there, but we have to get other products as well.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): I appreciate that. Throughout the line of questioning, this is what is coming up in my mind: in real terms, it is not really a saving, Grainia. You have learned to live within your allocated budget, really.

Mr Boyle: There has been a hell of a top-up during it.

Mr Price: It is improved value for money.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): It is an improvement, but savings for me is that you have excess cash that you can reinvest elsewhere. That is the point that I was making.

Mr Boyle: I get that.

Ms Long: That is fair enough. We were asked to achieve value for money in the provision of homelessness services at a time of acute crisis —.

Mr Boyle: You have achieved that.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): A reduction is a reduction, but, to me, when you have excess money there to invest in other areas, the cure is a much better use of public money. Yes, I get it. That is why I went after that issue.

Mr Price: We have retained spending power in the Department. The Department had options to spend it on things that compete, even with the logical case for the strategic prevention of homelessness, such as Supporting People, which is preventing homelessness.

Mr Boyle: Our Minister has a burning frustration that he does not have enough money for social housing.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Yes. OK.

Mr Gildernew: I made a note of concern, Grainia, when you talked about looked-after children at age 18. Has best practice or legislation not been changed to move that looked-after children protection, given that they are so vulnerable, to more like age 25? Has the Housing Executive taken account of that, given those young people's needs?

Ms Long: Yes.

Mr Gildernew: It is very young to be pitching somebody out.

Ms Long: Just for the avoidance of doubt, given that this is a public forum, I was talking about the point at which the responsibility of social services and health services passes to other public agencies. That is the point at which we too often see — it happens less now but still too often — young people falling between the gaps in services. New Foundations is all about that and about systems change and how we get conversations to happen between health trusts, the Housing Executive and other public agencies much earlier so that we are planning housing solutions for young people from when they are 14, 15 or 16.

Mr T Buchanan: Thank you for being here today and for taking all the questions. I listened to the Chair talk about the £13·8 million. What is involved with that seems to be a paper exercise rather than delivery on the ground, but let us get back to social housing. Since 2017, over 3,200 homes have been sold under the house sales scheme. I understand that the proceeds of that scheme are not being reinvested into building new social housing. Why is that?

Mr Price: By and large, they are. They score as a capital receipt to —.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Paul, for Hansard, you need to speak into the mic, otherwise the staff will find it difficult to pick up what you say.

Mr Price: By and large, they are. We see the effect of them in an increased capital allocation to DFC. The problem is that the sale proceeds still leave a gap; you do not get one for one. A new two-bedroom social home costs about £206,000. The proceeds from a discounted sale under the right-to-buy scheme will be much less.

Mr T Buchanan: Are you saying that the proceeds of the sales scheme is going back into social housing?

Mr Price: It is the disposal proceeds fund, is it not?

Ms Long: Previously, the Housing Executive was allowed to retain the capital receipts from the homes that it sold under the house sales scheme every year. Those capital receipts essentially went into the reserve of the landlord, which we could use for a number of things. We have tended to use it for adaptations for our tenants who have disabilities or illness and require their homes to be adapted. This year is the first year in which those receipts have not been retained, and that has put significant pressure on the landlord reserve, so we have had to fund adaptations from the existing reserve. That is a source of concern for me, as accounting officer.

Catherine, is there anything that you want to add?

Ms McFarland: Just that that can be a substantial amount of money every year. This year, for example, our adaptations programme is sitting at around £12 million. As Grainia said, we have to find a different way to fund that, and we do not retain those capital receipts any more. We used to bid for those capital receipts, as we still do and always will, but, unfortunately, we were not allocated those receipts, so that puts pressure on the finances on the landlord side.

Mr T Buchanan: What implications is that having for the development of new social housing?

Ms Long: I will talk about just the Housing Executive, but I am sure that the Department will want to come in. This is an area of disagreement. I have to say this as a landlord: every social landlord manages their balance sheet very carefully, because they are retaining rental income to improve their tenants' homes. Therefore, every penny that I spend has to be in the interests of those tenants and the future stability of their homes — keeping them safe, warm and dry in their homes. We are in the situation in which we have no choice but to sell our homes at a discount. That discount in 2023-24 amounted to £8·3 million. That is £8·3 million off our balance sheet, plus we lose the homes and the rental income over a 30- to 45-year business plan. All that added up, and now, on top of that, we do not get to retain the receipts. That has a real material impact on us, as the landlord. As well as that, as a landlord, we want to be in a position in the next few years of being able to borrow against that asset in order to fund new homes.

I am giving you an indirect answer that has a direct bearing on our balance today, but, in the future, when, hopefully, we will be in a position to borrow as a public landlord, we can reduce the number of homes that we can borrow against as well as our borrowing capacity. That is the direct effect for the Housing Executive and why its board believes that house sales scheme should no longer apply to the Housing Executive.

Ms McFarland: That is money that we cannot invest in our homes, quite simply, and we need as much money as possible to invest in our homes. As Grainia says, that is exactly why the revitalisation programme and the outline business case are there.

Mr Price: We do not dispute any of that, but that funding effectively becomes part of the Department's capital budget. We get the receipt, and, in any typical year, we will spend 80% of our capital budget on new social housing, so it does not work for the Housing Executive at all, but it produces new social homes.

Mr Boyle: Chair, we will write to you about that to set it out for clarity.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Members will be keen on knowing about the process. Grainia, you laid it out extremely well. It was fascinating, actually. If that clarification could be provided with the other bits and pieces, it would be very helpful.

Mr Boyle: We will do that.

Mr T Buchanan: With the reduction in social housing stock, what are the medium- to long-term homelessness service pressures, including on temporary accommodation?

Ms Long: Over the past nine years, housing need in Northern Ireland has increased by 80% — eight zero.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Did you say "eight zero", so 80%?

Ms Long: Yes. It has increased by 80% over the past nine years. That figure is taken, essentially, from the housing market assessment that we have undertaken every year since the Housing Executive has been in existence. We take those numbers and use them to predict the next 15 years. As I say, that 15-year assessment sets out that we need just under 100,000 homes and then splits that figure between social and affordable housing. The total need across all tenures for the next 15 years is 95,000. That is split between 25,000 social, 15,000 intermediate — that is, affordable housing — and 54,000 market. We can split that, which we do — I have it in front of me — and we publish it, by the way, as it is public data, across each council area. That is why I present to all 11 councils.

That data is used to inform local development plans and planned policies for planning teams in each of the local authorities. In turn, we furnish it to housing associations, developers and anyone who is interested in developing land to enable them to see where the areas that we support new social housing development are. As a statutory consultee, the Housing Executive works in development management and development planning, so a planning committee will seek our statutory advice about whether we can support a scheme from anybody who is applying to a planning committee for a new build.

Mr T Buchanan: Are you satisfied that you have a strategy in place to meet that need over the next 15 years?

Ms Long: From a Housing Executive point of view, we are certainly satisfied that we know the numbers. Those who are working on the housing supply strategy, which Paul outlined and which belongs to the Department, have taken those numbers and are putting an action plan together.

Mr Price: Those are fed into —.

Ms Long: By the way, let me say that I completely 100% support it and the fact that the Housing Executive is and will be the key driver of that. However, just to give you a technical answer, the numbers are very clear and are fed into the supply strategy. Yes, absolutely. It will not happen without us.

Mr Price: We have the right strategy. It is a challenge to deliver it — one of the other challenges is budget — but we definitely have the right strategy.

Mr T Buchanan: OK. Again, looking at the escalating temporary accommodation costs, is enough being made of unoccupied properties across the whole social housing sector?

Ms Long: I suppose that the answer to that is no. However, as a housing professional, I would always urge caution when thinking about the extent to which unoccupied homes can be used at scale to meet housing need. The main reason for that is that they are very expensive to bring back into use. However, I am also conscious of the fact that the Republic of Ireland is launching a new housing plan today that is very focused on bringing vacant homes back into use, and it is putting what looks like significant resource into vacant property grants to bring homes back into use. The Housing Executive used to have a programme that was about bringing vacant properties back into use. We had grants available. That is no longer in place. We no longer have funding for it, and I do not know whether it is a funding issue. It has not been a policy area for which we have had responsibility for a number of years.

Certainly, when we look to other jurisdictions, we see that there is a case for those to be part of the overall package of measures, sitting alongside new build.

Mr T Buchanan: I have one final question, Chair. How do you monitor and report voids across all the forms of social housing?

Ms Long: Do you want to answer on other sectors, Paul, and I can cover the Housing Executive?

Mr Price: Yes.

Ms Long: The Housing Executive is a landlord of 83,000 or 84,000 homes. We have a very small number of voids. Our total number of voids is 0·4% of all our stock. We have very clear targets for void management, as we should. We set high targets for ourselves, and our teams measure those, because every home that is void and does not have anybody living in it means that somebody is on the waiting list unnecessarily. Void management is a really important part of ensuring that we have housing supply. We have 16,054 voids, but 351 of those are actionable. An actionable void is a home that would normally be used but is empty for some reason. It usually happens between tenancies, such as when we are undertaking a change of tenancy works. All the others are properties that are either empty for redevelopment or for another reason. We have a very large redevelopment in north Belfast at the moment over the long streets. We have a small number of tower block units that are being held as void for demolition, but there is a very low number of voids. As I say, 351 are actionable and will be brought back into use within weeks through a change of tenancy.

Mr Price: Housing associations are independent, but we regulate them. One thing that we regulate them for is performance on voids. We ask them to keep voids at a level that is below 4% of their portfolio. They are meeting that target. Their level of voids is proportionately not as high-performing as the Housing Executive's; the figure is slightly higher. In 2023-24, they had 473 lettable voids in their portfolio, which is less than 4%. About half were void for up to six months, and about half were void for longer than six months — up to 12 months — and a few went into a second year.

Can they be a source of temporary accommodation? Sixty are already being used. The Housing Executive has accepted a recommendation to develop a plan to see if we can increase that. It is difficult, because they are a moving target. We will look at ways in which the regulatory function can maybe collect more information on voids. That may improve the rate at which a void property returns to social supply, which would be a good thing. It may or may not open up a way to increase their use as temporary accommodation. Does that answer your question?

Mr T Buchanan: The difficulty is that, the longer that you let a house lie void, the more money it takes to make it liveable again for somebody to move into it. It is much better if you can keep those houses occupied when there is a need in front of you that is so evident.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Catherine wants to come in briefly.

Ms McFarland: It is just one point. I am sorry if we have finished this one, but the member talked about efficiencies at the very start. I know that, given that it is not dealt with in cash terms, the whole budgeting process is difficult. However, we have absolutely made cost savings — actual cost savings — that represent savings to the public purse. I emphasise that point because it is a painful exercise every year. It is not easy. It is very difficult, and, culturally, as an organisation, we have moved to the point where it is how we work. However, those are actual, significant cost savings year-on-year. I just wanted to make that point.

Mr T Buchanan: I appreciate that.

Ms Long: That is linked to the point about voids, because 220 void Housing Executive properties have been used as temporary accommodation. We are using those. That is not in the figure that I gave you, so, outside that, we have 220. That has been hugely important, and we have saved money for the public purse by making those voids available. There are big savings.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): This is a wee bit relevant to Tom's point, but what about the level of tenancy fraud that may exist? I mean people who are saying that they are separated from a partner, yet the two of them have a house up and down the street or whatever. What is the percentage of that?

Mr Price: Do you want me to come in on that?

Ms Long: Please do, Paul, if you can find the number before me. That would be great.

Mr Price: Yes, I can. The numbers are generally quite low relative to the size of the portfolio as a potential impact on, for instance, the temporary accommodation issue. In a typical year, you have about 300 suspected cases, with about half confirmed after investigation

Ms Long: Yes. From 1 April to 31 March last year, we had 752 cases of suspected fraud, and I can give you the breakdown of those, but the majority, 635, were related to abandonment and non-occupation. During the past year, we recovered a total of 169 properties that were subject to tenancy fraud. Again, that points to watching not just your voids but unoccupied properties and bringing them back into use. That is a high level of performance on our part in constantly watching out for fraud. You might think that if there were 752 suspected cases and you are recovering only 169, that is not a great record. However, not all of them were fraud; they were suspected cases. Also, understandably, there is a very high bar — there should be a high bar — for any landlord to reach before they remove somebody's tenancy. That is a really significant thing to do to somebody. If we remove your tenancy — that is, the tenancy, not just the property — you will no longer be a tenant, and that affects everybody in the family. Therefore, if you are the child of somebody who is found guilty of fraud, you lose your tenancy as a child. We recovered those 169 properties, but, as I say, there is a high bar, which there should be.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): I have no doubt that it is an extremely complex legal situation to fall into, albeit that if someone is found in that situation, it is a significant saving for the public purse if the property is recovered and given to a family that needs it. However, that fraud can equally happen through housing benefit on some occasions.

I have a final brief point on this. How do you inspect? What is the mechanism in each council area? How is that done?

Ms Long: It is a core part of the role of the patch manager. Each Housing Executive housing officer, or patch manager, has an area for which they are responsible. It is their job to manage the properties in that area and make sure that they are occupied and maintained. It is stipulated in a patch manager's job description that they will work very closely with the rest of the local team. If they have any concerns, they will deal with it proactively. They will make visits, knock on doors, speak to neighbours, local community representatives, elected representatives sometimes and other public agencies to understand whether somebody is living in a property. Sometimes there are genuine and real reasons for a property to be occupied, and we are able to manage those carefully. Where we find fraud we take it forward. However, it is often the act of doing that work that resolves the issue.

Mr Price: We will legislate in this mandate to extend into the housing association sector the power that the Housing Executive has to investigate its own cases of tenancy fraud. That power does not exist at this point, and it would be really helpful in addressing that sector's fraud cases.

Mr Boyle: If it is helpful, we will write to you summarising that.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): OK. That is grand. Thank you.

Mr Delargy: Thank you for your answers so far. I want to raise four key points. The first moves on from your definition earlier, Grainia, that looking solely at social homes will not be the only solution and that we need to look at affordable homes as well. To me, there is therefore a contradiction in properties being sold in that you are shifting or apportioning that lack of housing to a different part of the budget. I can see the contradiction in that that Colm and Cathal mentioned.

What is the Department doing to ensure that affordable homes are made available in this mandate? Are there any time-bound actions?

Mr Boyle: We can talk to you about the pilots that we have.

Mr Price: Beyond the social sector, we have a range of affordable home products. I have mentioned them. We have the Co-Ownership scheme. Over the past few years, of all the public loan finance that has been available to the Northern Ireland Executive, we have spent 75% of it on co-ownership. That has delivered 9,000 homes to this point, and we have secured £150 million for the next four years to deliver another 4,000 homes.

We have launched a new affordable product, which is intermediate rent. I say that we have "launched" it, but it should start to provide its first 300 houses. Many of them may have been appointed. That will start rolling out from now, and we hope that, again, it will use FTC. It is not competing with the kind of funding that goes into social housing. We hope to expand that.

A range of things is being done in the private sector to try to improve it. Those measures provide the kinds of guarantees and security that tenants need. Therefore, we have minimum energy and fire-safety standards. To this point in the mandate, we guarantee that a landlord can have only one rent increase in every 12 months.

In the remainder of the mandate, the Minister will regulate to deliver the extended notice to quit, significantly extending the notice that the landlord needs to serve on a tenant to quit. It is about a range of things that address the wider housing market, and the housing supply strategy takes a longer-term view of that over the next 15 years.

Mr Delargy: The schemes are beneficial and have real potential, obviously, but I am interested in two specific elements of them. First, what are your KPIs for them? How do you measure whether they have been successful? Secondly, I am 29, and a lot of my friends are buying houses, but none of them know about those schemes. What is the marketing strategy for the schemes? How does word get out? When I talk to people about the schemes, they look at me with a blank face — they have never heard of them — and that is a worry of mine.

Mr Price: We set targets on housing supply in the departmental business plan and, indeed, in the Programme for Government. We have our target on co-ownership to make sure that we get the budget out this year, but that does not address your wider point. If those kinds of interventions are not broadcast, we need to look at that. I had better take that point away and come back to you on it, because it needs addressing.

Mr Boyle: Moving beyond a pilot to drive the scheme out on a bigger scale is the essence of the question. A lot of ambition is required, and it comes back to the funding question. A lot of funding will have to be put behind it. It is the right direction of travel. Grainia made the point that we need affordable homes and need them at scale. You are right to ask the question; it is a very pertinent one.

Mr Delargy: I will move on from that. There is an ambition to build 67,000 new homes in the next 15 years. That is a departure from Deirdre Hargey's ambition of 100,000 new homes. Not only is that a departure but it is a failure to deliver as many homes as there should be. What quantifiable measures are associated with that? What are the monitoring arrangements? How will it be monitored monthly, yearly and in the short, medium and long term to make sure that the targets are met? We do not want to get to 2039 and say, "This target has not been met".

Mr Price: We are working on that now. The Executive agreed the housing supply strategy in December 2024. Since then, we have been preparing the action plan to govern the first three years. I will be the senior responsible officer of the programme, so I will ask those questions. I am asking other Departments to give me commitments that I can measure in exactly the terms that you asked about. Just to be clear: the target is 100,000; it has not changed. The 67,000 figure describes the non-social element of the big target, with the remaining third being the social element.

Mr Delargy: That is reassuring. With your indulgence, Chair, my final point is one that I make regularly with the Department of Education. I am a former teacher, and, every time that I look at new schools being built, I find it to be really frustrating, because that work is based on the current data and statistics rather than on the trends and projections. I am looking for an assurance that the trends and projected figures rather than the current statistics are being taken into account.

Mr Price: Grainia talked about the strategic housing market analysis. Its assessment of need over the next 15 years is just over 25,000, which is about 1,690 a year. That is very flat, basically, so it applies if nothing changes. We did an assessment in our housing supply strategy in quite an informal way, in discussion with stakeholders, and we found that our 33,000 figure represents an acceptance, if you like, that things will happen demographically over that period. We will review that assumption and see how wise it looks and whether it needs changing as the 15 years unfold. We have tried to do that.

Mr Delargy: I appreciate that there is an ambition to do that, but how can we get a more solid commitment to look at the trends and re-evaluate them as time goes on? Grainia mentioned that there have been three waves in the past couple of years. How often will the assumption be updated and reviewed and so on?

Mr Price: We had better come back to you on that. I cannot be glib and just say that I know the answer right now. I agree with you that it is really important. The first review of the action plan, which will be towards 2027-28, needs to answer your question.

Mr Boyle: It is a thoughtful question, and we will give it a thoughtful answer.

Mr Delargy: I appreciate that. Thank you.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Thank you. I have a final question about avoiding the crisis cliff edge for homelessness. Officially, someone is not homeless until they are literally out of the door and present at the Housing Executive. What is the best way to deal with that in order to avoid a crisis situation in which someone has to appear at the eleventh hour, having lost their home?

Ms Long: In the vast majority of cases, we want to avert that at every stage. We always say to people, "Get in touch with us as early as you can". That does not mean that we can assist you on the day that you want us to, because our duty kicks in to assist within 28 days of somebody losing their home, which means that we have a duty to assist in advance of that. However, it is always our view that people should let us know as early as possible, because that allows us to plan. Housing advice is available, and we often find that what people think is the worst-case scenario can be averted by putting them in touch with the right kind of organisation or agency. That is the first thing.

We also fund, as we should, a number of housing organisations in the voluntary and community sector that provide housing advice and housing solutions in addition to our work. That includes, for example, tenancy deposit schemes for people who are concerned about their ability to afford a deposit. I would say this: get in touch as early as you can, because that will give us the best possible opportunity to plan for you and with you.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): That is great. You have been through two hours and 15 minutes of questions. I do not think that we have any further questions, but I cannot let you leave without a comment from the Comptroller and Auditor General. Have you anything to add?

Ms Dorinnia Carville (Northern Ireland Audit Office): Nothing.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Stuart?

Mr Stuart Stevenson (Department of Finance): Nothing from me, Chair.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): That is not like you, Stuart.

Mr Boylan: I have a wee point. You made the interesting point about recovering tenancies in the context of potential fraud. If we are to address some of that as part of our report, we need to look at responsibility across Departments. From working in my council area, I know that there is a high threshold for deciding whether a tenant is evicted. If we are to get this right, we need to work across the board, and that needs to be reflected. That is all that I am saying. To be fair, Colum, you mentioned talking to the permanent secretaries, but there is also an element of work to be done across the board, because, when you get down to that level — we are talking about crime and fraud — we need to address it properly. There are all those factors. It is more than the sum of its parts, and there is severe pressure on all of us collectively.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Thanks, Cathal.

Colum, you are retiring. Am I allowed to say that now?

Mr Boyle: Yes, you can.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): When is your last day?

Mr Boyle: Technically, it is the end of December, but the date is yet to be uncovered. It depends on the priorities. I will be away before that.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Right. How many years have you been with the Civil Service?

Mr Boyle: I have been in public service for 40 years and in the Civil Service for 20.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Amazing.

Mr Boyle: I have been in the Senior Civil Service since 2005.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): On behalf of the Committee and, indeed, the Assembly, I wish you well in your retirement. It is very hard-earned. That is an incredible contribution to the public, and we sincerely thank you for it and for being with us today. We wish you and your family well and wish you a well-deserved retirement.

Mr Boyle: I appreciate that. Thank you very much.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Thank you very much to you and your team. I put on the record that all of us engage with the Housing Executive more frequently than we would like to, but the teams are exceptional. They work hard in very difficult situations. I would be very appreciative if, on behalf of the Committee, you would pass on our sincerest appreciation to the people at the coalface, who deal with sensitive, difficult and challenging circumstances. We are deeply appreciative of their efforts and, of course, of your leadership of your team.

Mr Boyle: Thank you.