Official Report: Minutes of Evidence

The Deputy Chairperson (Ms Forsythe): It is brilliant to have you all here today as part of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) inquiry into homelessness in Northern Ireland. I welcome Nicola McCrudden, CEO of Homeless Connect; Mark Baillie, head of policy and programmes, Homeless Connect; Jim Dennison, chief executive of the Simon Community; and David Carroll, CEO of Depaul. I also welcome Dorinnia Carville, the Comptroller and Auditor General for Northern Ireland; and Stuart Stevenson, the Treasury Officer of Accounts in the Department of Finance.

Ms McCrudden, Mr Baillie, Mr Dennison and Mr Carroll, thank you for agreeing to attend the Committee. I hand over to you: perhaps you want to make some opening remarks.

Ms Nicola McCrudden (Homeless Connect): Thank you very much, Deputy Chair. Good afternoon, members. I thank members for giving us the opportunity to brief the Committee this afternoon on the Audit Office report on homelessness.

As many of you might know, Homeless Connect is a representative body for the homelessness sector here. We provide a range of direct intervention homelessness prevention services, one of which is FareShare. We distribute surplus food to people in need throughout Northern Ireland: 700 tons of food is distributed to charities, schools and hostels here. We are acutely aware of the scale and impact of the homelessness and poverty facing this society. Members, as you will know from your constituency offices, we are in the midst of a housing and homelessness crisis. The Audit Office report starkly outlines the scale of the challenge. To state an obvious point, there are far too many people here who are not able to access affordable and secure housing that is suitable to their needs. Too many people are going over the edge into homelessness, with all that that means for their mental health and well-being. Far too many children live in temporary accommodation with the consequences that come with that.

We acknowledge that Northern Ireland is not unique in the homelessness challenges that it faces. The permanent secretary for DFC and the chief executive of the Housing Executive outlined the challenges during their session at your Committee a few weeks ago. They provided helpful comparisons with other jurisdictions. However, it remains the case that the number of households with full duty applicant (FDA) status has grown by a staggering 135% over the past decade. In August 2025, almost 62,000 individuals from 32,000 households on the social housing list had homelessness status. That gives a sense of the scale: you could fill SSE Arena Belfast five and a half times over with the number of people we are talking about.

All three of our organisations work collaboratively with statutory and public-sector partners. Solving homelessness must be done in collaboration across sectors and Departments. It would be uncharitable and wrong for us not to recognise the challenges faced by our statutory partners, particularly the Housing Executive, and that there have been positive and progressive changes made in recent years that have made a difference. However, the Audit Office report raises several important questions about the homelessness system. I am pleased to say that there has already been positive progress on some of the recommendations set out in the report, but there is further to go.

Broadly speaking, the Audit Office report covers four main areas: governance, housing supply, prevention and temporary accommodation. With your indulgence, Deputy Chair, I will briefly touch on governance before handing over to Jim and then David. We noted the comments of the permanent secretary at Committee two weeks ago, when he acknowledged that there are challenges with the governance of the homelessness system as it stands. He referred to the number of groups and the terms of reference. We go further: we need a governance system that helps our public and statutory organisations to collaborate and cooperate effectively to prevent and reduce homelessness. The system as it stands is nowhere near where it needs to be to respond to the challenges that we face.

As our briefing outlines, we believe that there are two significant problems with the current governance arrangements. First, the oversight group at the top of the governance system, which is the housing strategy steering group (HSSG) — we all love initialisms — is attended by officials who are not able to make decisions on behalf of the Departments represented. That leads to considerable frustration, and it slows down progress. If it is a priority for the Northern Ireland Executive to prevent and reduce homelessness, senior staff of at least the rank of deputy secretary or equivalent should engage in the structures seeking to bring about that outcome. Secondly, the HSSG should be independently chaired. The Department has ultimate control over the agenda and how an issue will be discussed and debated. As our briefing states, although that ability to frame the discussion is subtle and can be overlooked, it is crucial to the effectiveness of such a group. All Departments should be held to account, including the Department for Communities. Other jurisdictions have independent chairs for their equivalent bodies, and that would be a valuable step to take.

Mr Jim Dennison (Simon Community): I watched intently your session two weeks ago with the Housing Executive and DFC. That input started with numbers, and your questioning then turned to people. It is important that I marry those, because, when we talk about "households", that is misleading. A household can be one person or a family of six, so I will add colour and talk of "people", because that is what it is about. I will then talk about housing supply. There is a narrative that we got into the crisis five years ago: we did not. We got into the crisis a long time ago and have not got out of it due to decisions that we can change.

The Housing Executive referred to the Simon Community asking under freedom of information (FOI) questions about people. We have been doing that for two years. I will talk about people rather than households. The most recent statistics, which we got this morning, bring us up to September of this year. There were 90,819 people on the social housing waiting list. There were 71,394 people in housing stress. The number of those deemed to be legally homeless — i.e. those who have FDA status — was 62,314. Of that number, 19,657 were under the age of 18. We have a huge generational problem here, and we can see it clearly. Often, official stats point to presenters, and we are led to believe that, if the number of presenters comes down, we are dealing with the problem: we are not. FDA status — that is the number that you need to watch most carefully — has been going up month on month. I can provide those figures for you if you wish.

What does that mean for us as a homelessness charity? We are the largest provider of charitable beds in Northern Ireland: 484 beds per night. We took a snapshot of demand over one week during the summer. During that week, we had four beds become available, such is the lack of throughput of housing options. People are getting stuck in emergency accommodation. During that week, we took 364 requests for accommodation. That tells you that the supply simply is not there to match the demand. If you want to query why the bill for non-standard accommodation — the standard with no support — is going up, you might want to look at that figure. I do not know where the other 360 people whom we could not accommodate are, but they must be somewhere in the system. It is a rising problem that we need to watch carefully. I suggest that reporting on people now becomes part of the public narrative. We ask for those stats under FOI, and, to be fair, the Housing Executive provides them. It is a human issue. We should present on those figures on a quarterly or other regular basis.

The supply issue has been around for a long time. I know that you know that, but the context is important. In 2002, the Housing Executive stopped building, and building responsibility transferred to housing associations. At that time, the Housing Executive had 110,000 homes, and housing associations had 20,000. Fast forward to now, and the Housing Executive has lost about a quarter of its stock — it has 83,000 homes — and housing associations have 61,000. We have gone from 130,000 to 144,000 homes, which means that, in the past 20-odd years, we have extended our social housing stock by only 14,000 homes. You can see where the pressure is rising, because we have a rising population anyway. When you mix in the pandemic, wars, economic crisis and other things, you can see how the situation is exacerbated.

I want to talk about today's homelessness bulletin and let you know where we are against housing supply aspirations. In the first two quarters of this financial year, we started 41 homes — one in the first quarter of April to June and 40 in the second quarter of July to September — and we completed 503. We are falling well short of the aspiration to deliver over 100,000 homes in the coming period. This is not a new problem; it is a problem that we started many years ago. We still allow right-to-buy, which means the loss of Housing Executive homes, and we still underinvest in social housing stock. That is why we are in a homelessness crisis.

Mr David Carroll (Depaul): Despite my accent, I have worked in homelessness services in Northern Ireland for the past 23 years. I will focus specifically on temporary accommodation, because that is what the Audit Office report focuses on. It does no harm to remind ourselves that the total expenditure on temporary accommodation in 2023-24 was £38·6 million. The expenditure on hotels and B&Bs accounted for £12·2 million, which represented a 13-fold increase from the £9 million spent in 2019. The spend on non-standard accommodation has soared from zero in 2015-16 to £45,574 per day in 2024-25.

It is important to understand how we have got to that place. The situation is not helped by the consequences of the epidemic; demographic change; the influence of migration, which has to be examined through a positive lens; the absence of government; and the wider macroeconomic environment. However, fundamentally, failure to plan and invest is at the root of the issue. Failure to treat the issue as a true crisis will have longer-term consequences for the public purse and, importantly, the households and communities that we all serve.

The Housing Executive operates in a reactive and emergency paradigm, and that has allowed the proliferation of profit-motivated, private-sector interests. Why has that happened? The private sector can respond far more quickly than the non-governmental organisation (NGO) sector, which does not have the financial muscle to respond. We are all in deficit positions, with no real access to bricks and mortar. There are weak relationships with the housing association sector body, which also faces huge challenges. Contrast the open-wallet approach shown to the private sector with the treatment of the NGO sector's costs and its role in delivering the homelessness strategy and temporary accommodation. Despite a cost-of-living crisis and a recruitment-and-retention crisis, there have been minimal increases in the Supporting People pot; they have barely kept pace with inflation.

I have a couple of examples of where we are under specific pressure to provide in the absence of full cost recovery. Neither Supporting People nor the housing management fund will fund bottled water costs, which leaves us to raise donations of £20,000 per year for that. We are disallowed from providing any emergency funds for someone in distress, and we have to raise £20,000 against that. Stella Maris, which is our supported accommodation unit, has to raise money for food costs, which are far beyond the ability of our service users; we are required to raise £60,000 for that. As the Supporting People fund does not pay for food, it disallowed four bottles of water that we provided when an MLA visited our service a few years ago.

The NGO sector is also excluded from the provision of temporary accommodation. There has been little opportunity in that regard. We are a housing-led sector and believe that temporary accommodation, ultimately, should not exist. However, there have only been three projects in the past number of years: the dispersed intensively managed emergency (DIME) accommodation in Derry/Londonderry; a women's accommodation project, where the tender price was set at such a low level that it was impossible to make a bid; and a current call for crash beds. For the first time in six years, Depaul has expanded its service portfolio to include a community transition service for women who are leaving prison. That housing-led pilot is completely funded by charitable funds. Finally, after two years, a piece of Housing First research will be launched in the House on Monday. Let us see if, on Monday, there is a meaningful plan to commit resources or targets against that research. I would be delighted if that occurred. Depaul launched its first Housing First programme 10 years ago, but there has been a failure to make meaningful capital or revenue investment in Housing First.

The consequences of being in temporary accommodation for a long period are not spoken about to any meaningful degree. A study that Depaul did with the Simon Community in 2023 found that 68% of people experiencing homelessness had a diagnosed mental health condition, compared with the figure of 19% for the overall population. Temporary accommodation is a challenging environment. It has the human cost of delayed child development and poor educational attainment. Drug and alcohol problems are made worse if the individual's need for adequate, high-standard temporary accommodation is not addressed. We are storing up problems for the future for both the Exchequer and the individuals themselves. Temporary accommodation needs trauma-informed environments and independent, own-door settings. Non-standard accommodation and B&B accommodation do not provide that.

The role of other Departments is key. Nicola has spoken already about the role of the interdepartmental homelessness strategy steering group. There are not senior enough figures sitting round the table at that group to make it meaningful and for it to have power. Health has committed little funding to the issue. Without significant Health input, Housing First, if it is scaled up, will not have the impact that it could have .

What needs to happen now? A strategic action plan for temporary accommodation was published in 2020. We want that report put back on the table. We want an evaluation to be done of what supply is needed and a costed exit plan to minimise use of the private sector. If we know how much it costs, we will have something to aim for. Alongside that, we need to assess how much it would cost to introduce Housing First significantly. Targets need to be set. Again, if we know how much it costs, we will have something to aim for. Of the 600 properties that the Housing Executive plans to purchase, 100 need to be ring-fenced for Housing First. Those will not be permanent tenancies, but it is hugely important that we focus on people with complex needs. I call for the establishment of a housing commission to bring together all of the different facets and disparate elements of the issues that we face. I truly believe that we need a subcommittee of the Stormont Executive, chaired by the First Minister and deputy First Minister, to drive and lead a new, reviewed interdepartmental homelessness action plan that has teeth. We need meaningful investment from Health and the Public Health Agency (PHA). If we allow the issue to continue, the costs will not only be financial: more important, it will result in human suffering and an attack on dignity.

The Deputy Chairperson (Ms Forsythe): Thank you, all, for that and for the work that you do on all of this. It is absolutely invaluable. As we, as a Committee, were planning our approach to our inquiry, we decided to bring in departmental officials and the Housing Executive, but it was also important to us to hear the voices at the coalface. We really appreciate your coming here so that we can do that.

Jim, I will touch on something that you said. Officials told us that there are around 31,700 homeless households. I totally agree with your point — Daniel McCrossan brought it out in the previous session — that it is not just about "households", generic numbers and data; it is about people. Every person has a story, and every person could have a crisis. It could be on anybody's doorstep. You do not know how circumstances will change or how will hit. You gave some really useful figures. Can you build on that data a bit more to give the full extent of the issue? You got some stuff through FOI on the scale of the issue in Northern Ireland.

Mr Dennison: Absolutely. I am happy to do so, Deputy Chair. Thank you. As I said, we have been on a journey, and, unfortunately, we have to ask for information under FOI because the stats are not readily available. As I said, I do not like the term "household", and I do not like the term "unit". We are talking about people's homes. None of us here after the busyness of today will go back to our "units". We need to talk about "people", because this is a people problem, and we need to talk about "homes".

On your question, Deputy Chair, in December 2023, 55,589 people had FDA status. Jumping forward to June 2024, the number had increased by nearly 3,000 people to 58,241. At Christmas 2024, the number was 59,518. In June of this year, when we did a snapshot in the summertime, the number was 61,698. The most recent figure, at September, was 62,314. There is a real issue here. Nicola gave the analogy of filling SSE Arena five and a half times. If all of those individuals were in one place, it would be the fifth-largest town in Northern Ireland. That is what you are dealing with.

The Deputy Chairperson (Ms Forsythe): Absolutely. As we bring our inquiry report forward, it is important that we quantify the full extent of the issue and look at the real numbers.

We have been looking at the homelessness strategy. Officials told us in Committee that there is no evidence that the homelessness strategy has failed: do you agree with their assessment?

Ms McCrudden: All of us were involved in the development of the homelessness strategy. There was really good consultation with and involvement of people from across the homelessness sector. It is a good, robust strategy, but, like everything, it needs to be properly resourced. That is largely the problem: we have not seen the full resources put into delivery of the strategy. At the other end of things, it needs to tie in with the housing supply strategy. We cannot solve homelessness if we are not building enough homes. Our concern is that we are not building homes; in fact, as is demonstrated by the figures that Jim has just given you, a backlog is building up.

Ultimately, the two strategies need to relate to each other, but it is not just about them; it is also about the interdepartmental homelessness action plan. All of you know that we cannot solve homelessness unless there is cross-departmental support. It goes back to my opening remarks about the governance arrangements. The Department for Communities is responsible for the interdepartmental homelessness action plan. We are all involved in helping to develop that, but the Department chairs the group that has oversight of that plan and of the homelessness strategy. As the permanent secretary said, it is time to review those structures — this is in the Audit Office report as a recommendation — and look at the possibility of having an independent chair. In Scotland, for example, an equivalent group is co-chaired by the Cabinet Secretary for Housing. Given the scale and size of the situation that we face — our concern is that, if we are not building enough homes, it will only get worse — having a chair who is independent or someone of significance would be really helpful for accountability.

Mr Carroll: The homelessness strategy cannot lie in isolation. I raised the specific issue of health. If you look at the reasons that people become homeless in the first place, you will see that health problems, including mental health problems, and drug and alcohol issues are major contributory factors. Health has a role to play in supporting people in temporary accommodation and once they go back into the community. It goes back to the mechanisms that you have in place to coordinate and integrate an overall plan. At the moment, as Nicola said, the Department for Communities is really in isolation. Its relationship with other Departments is not on a mandatory footing. I go further than Nicola: if the Programme for Government (PFG) is to address the issue, the Assembly needs to treat it as an emergency. There needs to be an interdepartmental plan, of which the homelessness strategy is part, alongside a health strategy and an infrastructure strategy as regards housing supply. All of that needs to be pulled together in a far stronger way whereby the system is accountable to the Executive Office. It needs to be driven as such in order to bring the Departments together. I echo Nicola's point that representation on the interdepartmental group needs to be at a very senior Civil Service level.

Mr Dennison: It would be unfair to say that the homelessness strategy has failed, because it is so reliant on other things. I will make an observation that is not particularly about housing but in which I will use housing as an example. We have traditionally been good at producing strategies here. We tend to have a variety of strategies that run on different timelines, with different owners and different funding pots. We are falling foul of that in housing. Although housing and homelessness are named in the Programme for Government, which is fantastic, we have, in no particular order, the DFC housing supply strategy 2024-2039; the DFC annual interdepartmental homelessness action plan — that is a mouthful to get out; the Housing Executive draft corporate strategy 2025-26 to 2027-28; the draft Supporting People strategic intent 2026-2031; the ending homelessness strategy 2022-27; the strategic plan for temporary accommodation 2022-27; and the youth homelessness action plan 2024-27. It is incredibly difficult to track outcomes across all of those. Often, we sit in different rooms with the same people talking about different metrics. We need to be outcome-focused and get a clear, measurable plan together, because we cannot work like that.

The Deputy Chairperson (Ms Forsythe): Absolutely.

Mr Dunne: Thank you, folks, for your presentations. We heard detailed and technical explanations of homelessness prevention, but we are keen to hear your direct experiences. Having visited the Simon Community in my constituency recently, I saw at first hand the good work that you do. What does effective homelessness prevention look like in practice? Will you share examples of successful early intervention and prevention strategies that are being implemented and could be implemented across the country?

Mr Mark Baillie (Homeless Connect): It is critical that we make the strategic shift to prevention. The best form of prevention is upstream, long before people reach homelessness. Some really innovative schemes are coming forward through the homelessness prevention fund. MACS, one of our member organisations, is running a programme in north Belfast called "Upstream", which is based on schemes that operate in other jurisdictions. It involves a universal survey of all young people at secondary school. Everyone answers the survey, so there is no stigma attached; it is not aimed at just those who are viewed as having fewer economic resources. That programme is designed to allow for interventions much earlier in the system.

Part of the problem has been that we have not had consistency of funding for homelessness prevention. As you are probably aware, there have been big swings in the homelessness prevention fund: this year, there is £2·5 million, but, last year, there was no homelessness prevention fund. Often, it has been short-term and reactive, which is not how you fund effective homelessness prevention. There are so many areas, because homelessness has so many drivers and causes. However, there are effective schemes. I know that, if the funding was available, our sector could take those forward. It is all about having consistent long-term funding to make a difference earlier in the process.

Mr Carroll: I will go further downstream and talk about the role that institutional care and support has in the prevention of homelessness. Looking specifically at the prison population, early intervention and release planning is key. A good example of that is the establishment of the community service for women who are leaving prison. We should have a clear idea of the trajectory of young people when they are in the care system and when they are about to leave care and of their independence thereafter. Hospital discharge protocols are needed, particularly for people who have complex needs. Such people can be assisted: they should not necessarily be discharged into temporary accommodation but could work with projects such as Housing First.

We welcome the publication, which will happen on Monday, of the research on Housing First. Compared with many jurisdictions in Europe and the UK, however, we have not moved as fast on that area as we should have. There are three elements to that: lack of revenue from the Housing Executive; lack of revenue from Health; and lack of a clear plan for how housing should come on board that group. I go back to the call for the Housing Executive to ring-fence some of those 600 properties as Housing First tenancies, because they are probably the individuals who will have the greatest complexity and, in some circumstances, are the most difficult to move on from temporary accommodation.

Mr Dunne: OK, thank you. That ties in with my next question, which is on the prevention and measuring of homelessness. The officials reiterated that it is difficult to develop an agreed definition of prevention and to measure it. What is your experience of the monitoring and outcome assessment performed by the sector on prevention measures? Why is it proving to be so difficult?

Mr Baillie: Yes. It is possible that there are definitions for the measurement of prevention, and the CEO of the Housing Executive referred to that. Part of the difficulty has been that it takes time to embed the change. We need to be careful not to tangle different funding streams and say that everything is prevention, because it is not. Only some elements of what is funded could rightly be described as homelessness prevention. For example, in references to Supporting People, a lot of that cannot be described as homelessness prevention, because providing temporary accommodation does not prevent homelessness, and that is a big part of the Supporting People funding. It would be worthwhile for the Committee to press to make sure that the different elements are not tangled when we talk about prevention. I acknowledge that defining it is a challenge — I do not deny that — but we should not accept the idea that Supporting People is prevention as a statement of the full situation.

Mr Dunne: Thank you.

Mr Dennison: You can measure prevention in certain ways, and let me give you a couple of examples. Quite a few years ago, we developed a tenancy deposit scheme. We put up a modest amount of money for people who could not secure a home in the private rented sector because of the financial barrier. The scheme has grown and is supported by the Housing Executive and charitable trusts. Two weeks ago, we gave out our 700th deposit. We have moved 700 people and families into private tenancies, and we can show a 96% success rate. The people keep their tenancies, and they pay their rent, and it keeps them out of temporary accommodation. We can roughly calculate the cost of temporary accommodation, and you can put a number on it to show the effect.

A number of years ago, in our response to the homelessness crisis, we set up a wholly-owned subsidiary called "Creating Homes", and that is exactly what it does. We buy property and create homes for people who are in our temporary accommodation and are ready and able to live independently. We have bought 30 homes, and we plan to double that over the coming period. Our programme was the pre-runner to the loan to acquire move-on accommodation (LAMA) programme; ours was almost the template. We can show that, if you move from emergency accommodation, with all the support that it requires, into your own home and can manage it, there are cost savings of around £14,000 per home. We have 30 homes, and that is saving the public purse about £500,000 per year. That is at no cost to the public purse because it is on us; it is our borrowing, and the Exchequer will get the money back. It will be ramped up. The issue with LAMA is that it is difficult to get the funding. Whilst the £10 million fund is modest, it could be ramped up, and it could be made easier for organisations such as ours to access it, because we can deliver a meaningful impact that can be shown to save costs.

Mr Carroll: The metric for advice centres and advice lines is clear: that is people approaching and getting advice from the likes of Housing Rights and the Housing Executive when they are in genuine difficulty from a legal point of view. The existence of floating support services that intervene specifically in the community is a clear metric for people who have been in neighbourhood disputes or running into rental arrears. Floating support intervenes there, and those services exist throughout Northern Ireland. The metrics are there, and it is about how they are defined.

Mr Dunne: Thank you.

The Deputy Chairperson (Ms Forsythe): Thank you. It is an important point and good examples. We will need to be creative to get agreed measurements of prevention. Preventing homelessness is like preventing crime or preventing anything: how can you prove that you stopped something happening? Those metrics and ideas are good, and I appreciate those examples.

Mr Burrows: Thanks. It has been enlightening. I have a couple of follow-up questions, but I will ask two other questions first.

At our evidence session with officials, they told us that they were deeply committed to prevention. In your experience, has that been demonstrated in your work with the statutory bodies, particularly the Housing Executive?

Ms McCrudden: I definitely believe that the Housing Executive and the Department are fully committed to preventing homelessness. I have spent my entire career working in housing and homelessness, and it is a repeat conversation that we tend to have. Sadly, it becomes a resource issue, and it needs to be properly resourced. Having annual budgets does not help the situation. If we get into a three-year budget cycle, we will be able to start to really try to make a difference through funding coming down through us and others to implement the programmes.

Our organisation, Homeless Connect, applied for and secured funding from the homelessness prevention fund. We have a programme called "Fresh Foundations" that will start this week, but the funding will end in March. That is a brand new initiative to provide a credit of £600 to enable people at risk of homelessness to purchase essential household items or food from us. We then work with our partners in England, Greater Change, for anything above and beyond that, which could include driving lessons or a training course. We need to be clear that homelessness is firmly linked to poverty.

Currently, the lead-in time is much shorter than we would have liked, and the funding will run out in March. We have been told that the Housing Executive wants to continue with it and that the programme will continue if the funding is there. Short-term funding cycles do not work, because it is difficult to demonstrate impact. A lot of good work is happening with the Simon Community, Depaul and other projects, and, as I said, I believe that our statutory partners are committed, as we are, to preventing homelessness.

Mr Burrows: Officials tell us that a strategic shift towards prevention is needed. Do you get a sense of that shift in strategic priority on the ground? This is a similar question: do you get a feeling of that happening? Is it in the language or the direction? Is it just words, or is it being operationalised? Has prevention been discussed?

Ms McCrudden: My belief is that it is being operationalised. We are still in the early days of having a homelessness prevention programme. I would like to be involved, along with colleagues in the sector, in shaping what the strategic priorities of that programme look like. We are keen to engage with the Housing Executive and the Department on what a homelessness prevention programme would look like. We need to take a little time to get that right. Maybe some of my colleagues would like to add to that.

Mr Baillie: I will note the scale. We are talking about £2·5 million for the homelessness prevention fund. I know that the Housing Executive had bid for £4·5 million, but only £2·5 million was granted. You have heard the numbers. The question that should be asked is this: does that amount meet the scale?

Mr Burrows: May I clarify that you think that the absence of a three-year funding cycle is an inhibitor to proper prevention?

Mr Baillie: Yes.

Ms McCrudden: There are other matters at play. We were deeply disappointed that, following the Budget announcement, local housing allowance rates continue to be frozen. We are trying to prevent homelessness while people struggle to pay their private-sector rents because of the difference between what will be paid through benefits and the widening gap. It is not a level playing field: people will still struggle to pay rent, and there will be affordability issues because of decisions made at Westminster.

Mr Burrows: You mentioned the tenancy deposit scheme. The requirement to have a deposit was an obstacle, so that scheme was good.

There is an increase in people having pets, and lot of private landlords do not take pets. Is that an issue? Does that cause some people not to be able to get into a house and to then become homeless?

Mr Dennison: I have not heard of examples of that, so I cannot answer that question specifically. There is, I think, more of an issue around requirements, because some landlords are moving from one month to two months and, in some cases, three months. There are issues —.

Mr Burrows: Is that deposits?

Mr Dennison: That is with the deposits. That is an inhibitor. There is also an issue with guarantors and references. It is more of a bureaucratic issue than an issue with pets, to be fair.

Mr Burrows: Something came up for a constituent of mine, so I was just wondering.

Strategically speaking, the Government started increasing taxes on landlords. There are a lot fewer write-offs, and, for a lot of people, it became less economically viable to be a landlord. I had a rental property — by accident, largely — and the tax system was punitive in order to try to put people off being private landlords and having second homes. Has there been a reduction in the number of private landlords or the amount of housing stock that is owned as buy-to-let properties?

Mr Carroll: You bring up a really legitimate question about the future of the private rented sector and where it is going. That accidental landlord group will find it more difficult to keep up their properties. There is less of a tendency to take people on housing benefit as well. The role of the private sector and institutional investors is a key issue. I have a question about the role of cost rental schemes and where we go with regard to that. That is a way in which we can lessen the reliance on the private rented sector as well.

Mr Burrows: This is my last question, I promise, and it is to make it really simple for me. In a pie chart of 100 people who are homeless, are there accurate stats to say that, for example, 12 in every hundred are because of a gambling addiction and five are because of domestic violence? Do we really understand the risk factors that cause homelessness? When individuals present to a statutory agency in a case of, say, domestic violence, that first report flags up a risk of homelessness, so what information do the police have to give? If someone is diagnosed with x, that is a risk factor for being homeless, so are they getting the following information? Do you know what I mean? Do we really have the detail? For every thousand people who are homeless, what percentage is due to gambling addiction, drug addiction or PTSD?

Mr Baillie: It is not broken down in that way. It is categorised in a set of categories —

Mr Burrows: In a broad way?

Mr Baillie: — in quite a broad way. It is worth saying that a lot of that information is identified, but perhaps there are legitimate questions to be asked about the way in which that is done. However, the collection of stats is not the biggest issue for us; it is more about addressing what we see coming through.

Mr Burrows: If we want to shift left, we could ask, "What is causing you to be here and present as homeless?". We need to understand the granular detail of that to then ask ourselves, "Where do we make the intervention?".

Ms McCrudden: To be fair, the Housing Executive carries out assessments. Everybody who presents as homeless will be interviewed by the Housing Executive, and it comes down to the information divulged to the housing officer at that time. That is what the Housing Executive is working with. It very much depends on the reasons for presenting, whether it is to do with domestic abuse or addiction. It is to do with how the person communicates that.

Mr Burrows: Where is that centrally? If I look at the pie chart and see that, for every hundred homeless people in Northern Ireland, two are homeless due to gambling addiction, 12 because of domestic violence, 16 because of alcohol addiction and 14 because they have a health problem, we understand what we are dealing with. Those causation factors need to be known.

Ms McCrudden: The Housing Executive has quite a bit of that detail. That is my understanding.

Mr Dennison: I will speak from the Simon Community's point of view. We will know the cause and effect of homelessness, because we do detailed support plans. We talk to individuals about what has happened in their life, what the current issues are and how we can support them to move on. We will have really good granular information on that. However, that information is not collected across the piece in any meaningful way. It is not taken up into the system and distributed, because, as Mark alluded to, it is broad themes rather than support needs.

May I jump back to your question about the landlords and the rising cost? We see that rising cost causing homelessness, because people cannot afford spiking rents and we do not have rent capping. It is a cause, and it is stopping people moving out of homelessness because they cannot afford those high rents. It is an issue, and we see that because the length of stay in our emergency accommodation is nearly a year now. The private rental sector is not an escape route for people who are stuck in that poverty trap.

Mr Burrows: Thank you.

Mr Carroll: You bring up a really legitimate question with regard to planning. For instance, if we are going to cost, truly, the introduction of Housing First on a regional basis, we need to know how many of that cohort require that sort of service. I have been working from the figure of probably 400 to 500 in the last couple of years. That is very much a rule of thumb. However, a forensic examination of that needs to occur.

The Deputy Chairperson (Ms Forsythe): Thank you. I have a quick question. There seems to be a lot of metrics and information available across the voluntary and community sector. Is the Department effectively using that?

Ms McCrudden: One of the challenges is the collation of that. I know that Supporting People has quite a lot of that data. That is my understanding. There are ways in which it could be utilised better. The Housing Executive is aware of the need for data collection, and there is some work ongoing on that. That is my understanding.

The Deputy Chairperson (Ms Forsythe): That is good.

Mr T Buchanan: What impact has reduced prevention funding in recent years had on your organisation and the homeless people whom you help?

Mr Dennison: Reduced funding puts pressure on us as a charity. The last thing that we want to do is reduce our services. We fundraise to put money into those. As Nicola said, when you live on an annualised basis and when you have to wait for funding, sometimes months after the start of the financial year, it can be difficult to plan and to commit. We can do more with more. We know that, with more, we effect savings and change people's lives, but the difficulty is that, when you cut off that stream, it is incredibly difficult for us to keep providing that service.

Mr Carroll: Funding is key not only in prevention services but in the more temporary accommodation sphere. The absence of full cost recovery is a huge problem. Recruitment and retention are key to delivering the range of services that we have. Unfortunately, as shown in the examples that Jim and I gave, we have to fundraise to subsidise services that are provided on behalf of the state. Moreover, we have no ability to be benchmarked against the public service on, for instance, salaries. We are in huge difficulties because of that. I have called for the NGO sector to be taken into consideration automatically when there are any changes to public-service salary rates and for an examination of pay parity. We have huge difficulties with staffing, given the general funding issues that we face.

Mr T Buchanan: What level of homelessness has the reduction in funding caused that could have been prevented?

Mr Dennison: It is difficult to quantify that. A prevention such as a floating support intervention to keep someone who is perhaps suffering from a life-changing addiction in their property and a prevention to give people the wherewithal to move into the private rented sector are two different things. We are not comparing apples with apples, so it is difficult to quantify that. We need to take that away and think about it, because we need to be able to answer it. To be honest, I cannot give you a specific answer on that without guessing.

Mr Delargy: Thanks for your answers so far. As mentioned, they have been really useful and have contributed to our knowledge of the topic. I was going to focus on the shift left, but I am aware that you have covered that in quite a lot of detail already, so I will start on the other two points, and, if we have time, I will come back to that.

I know that the Scottish Bill is being held up as something of an example of that shift left and how homelessness can effectively be tackled and people can be properly supported. I want to get a better understanding of what specific aspects of the Bill would be beneficial and what could be replicated in the North.

Mr Baillie: I will take that first, and then colleagues can come in. Our homelessness legislation — the Housing (NI) Order — goes back to 1988. The world has changed substantially since then. Scotland has had several housing- and homelessness-related Bills. In that time, we have not had a full, comprehensive review of homelessness legislation that we need to see. We have publicly called for that. We urge the Department to do a full, comprehensive review of our homelessness legislation.

Scotland is one of the jurisdictions that we look to. An aspect of its legislation that is quite innovative and that we are interested in is what is known as "ask and act", which is a duty on a number of statutory bodies, including, for example, the Scottish Prison Service, Police Scotland and the health bodies, to ask individuals about their housing needs and then to act on that information by passing it on to the relevant authorities. Again, that is about trying to get upstream to prevent people from entering the system before they face real challenges. Scottish legislation is progressive, and we urge you to look at it. It is not the only model, but certainly the recent "ask and act" legislation is what you need to look at.

Ms McCrudden: I will come in on the point about prevention. The Housing Executive's primary duty is to house people in temporary accommodation while priority need is investigated and to house FDAs in temporary accommodation until they are rehoused. Going back to the conversations that members had on prevention, we would be keen for there to be a duty to prevent homelessness, because that would mean that funding should become available to help to prevent homelessness in the first place. There should also be a duty to cooperate across Departments. The prevention duty should not be just for the Housing Executive; it should be for Health and Justice and other services as well. We would be keen to see something like that introduced here.

Mr Delargy: That is really interesting. It is good to understand the specifics. Looking at the overarching Bill can be informative for us, but it is about understanding what makes it work well and what specific parts of it we can replicate here. It is obviously a system that has a lot of parallels with our own, even in demographics, so that is certainly something that we can look at.

My second question is about interdepartmental working. There has been limited success in that sphere, and there is opportunity for a lot more. First, where do the blockages lie? Secondly, where do the opportunities lie? Are there more opportunities with Health and Education, and how do we best tackle that? One of the perennial problems that the Committee looks at is the silo working that sometimes occurs with Departments and how we need an all-of-government approach. For homelessness, particularly, that is critical.

Ms McCrudden: That is an interesting question. If we think about what happened during COVID, we would have thought that the response would be through the homelessness strategy steering group, because the group has cross-departmental representation, but that did not happen. I was not in post at the time, but I came in to help the sector to coordinate its efforts through colleagues. I will pass over to Jim, because he was the person behind creating a group to coordinate the homelessness and health responses.

Mr Dennison: COVID was starting to emerge, and three homeless charities joined together. We asked officials to come, and David was one of them. We asked individuals to come from the PHA, the Housing Executive and the PSNI and from a range of Departments. They all came with sufficient seniority to make decisions, and, very quickly, we stood up that group. We did not have the technology to do it. There were 15 people on calls and on speaker, but, very quickly, we were able to make decisions, which affected the communications in how we interacted. We were able to push for changes to legislation and to justify funding sources, and it worked incredibly well.

The uniform view at that time was that we needed to keep that going, because it was a model of good practice, of regular quick thinking and of quick action. However, it disappeared as society normalised. As COVID left our lives or left the centre of the stage, we all went into our silos. Despite attempts to get that back up and running, it did not happen. I think that it did not happen for two reasons: people fell into the trap of their own busyness and into departmental silo working.

One way to get that model back is to look at homelessness differently and see where it touches each Department, particularly with regard to the public purse. David will recall, going back as far as 2019, when we, along with Professor Dermot O'Reilly, suggested that there was a way to use data mapping, using existing data in Departments, to count the cost of homelessness to Health, Justice, housing and wherever else it touched. That got no traction despite having been presented to no fewer than three permanent secretaries.

I do not know why that is.

My whole thinking is that, if you have a sense of the total cost to our public purse, you can look at it differently. It is not about asking for more money; it is about spending money differently. We just get that resistance. We do not get it. It is interesting, because one of the officials said last week that they know that the new approaches on homelessness have effected savings in Health and Justice. If you know how you have made the savings, you must know how much you are spending, so, if you look at the total budget, you will have to start a different conversation, one about collaborative working. At the minute, that does not happen. Each Department has its pressures and interests, and they just do not connect meaningfully or in the way in which they should.

Mr Baillie: Can I follow that with a brief point? It is worth asking this question: why was the HSSG not the body that led on the response to COVID? That is a legitimate question, and, again, it is to do with seniority. We need effective interdepartmental working. We need the right people in the room, and we need the senior staff in the room. It is frustrating. Again, it is not personal; it is a structural issue. We recognise the commitment and diligence of a lot of the officials involved, but they are not in a position to make commitments to take things forward, and that slows everything down.

You asked about opportunities. There are opportunities across the spaces. I passionately believe that, if we could improve interdepartmental working, we could really make a difference in those spaces. There are some examples, particularly in the justice space, where there has been some really good collaboration, and that is largely because Justice officials recognise the impact on their Department of what happens on the ground. Again, that needs to go further, and they would be the first to say that, I am sure. There is so much more that can be done.

Ms McCrudden: All the members are aware of Complex Lives and the significant strides that that project has made albeit on a smaller scale. The chief executive of Belfast City Council chairs it, and we are all on that group. Senior chief executives across the board come together and are passionate about bringing about change. If such work can happen on that scale, there is no reason why it cannot happen on a wider scale.

Mr Carroll: Where Complex Lives works well, it works very well. The opportunities lie in the drug and alcohol strategy and how that is implemented, particularly on substitute prescribing, fast-tracking in substitute prescribing and safer injecting in Belfast city centre. There is a tendency for us to react rather than to be proactive. Complex Lives was established because of the huge crisis that we have on the streets of Belfast. I would love to see Complex Lives being extended to, for instance, Derry/Londonderry and for the whole initiative to be funded properly, because we are going from quarter to quarter with it. The project is not staffed adequately, but it provides an opportunity to integrate all the aspects and threads, such as safer injecting, policing, first responders and community safety under one umbrella. The Assembly needs to push that concept forward.

Mr Dennison: This is the last point from me. It is important that we illustrate examples, but they tend to be isolated examples. We work closely with health trusts here to provide the Housing First for Youth programme, and we are the only ones doing that work. It is about working with young people who have complex support needs to enable them to live independently in their own house albeit with a bit of support from us. That is funded through Health, and that is because Health has a statutory duty to look after those individuals and it discharges that duty through us. There are really good examples of that work. However, if you were to bring it together in a collegial, responsive, strategic and properly funded way, you would make a real difference — you absolutely would. However, we are just not getting that joined-up approach

Mr Delargy: That is really useful. As always, your knowledge and experience will make the report really useful and ensure that it carries that weight. You mentioned the group, so understanding what went well in that group would be really pivotal for us as a Committee. Through the Chair, I ask that you send any detail on that and on what, you felt, worked really well. That would be beneficial. The recommendation is to consider what has already worked well and is a proven success and what has been effective. It would be useful if you could send more specific details on that. I appreciate that we cannot go into all that in Committee today, but, if it could be sent on, we should certainly look at and review it as a Committee.

Thanks very much for your time today and, as always, for your comprehensive answers.

The Deputy Chairperson (Ms Forsythe): I was just going to say that any written evidence to follow the session would be welcome, especially evidence that goes across the board. Any examples that you have of different things would be appreciated.

Ms McCrudden: We contributed to the COVID inquiry, so that information is available, and we can pass it on.

Mr Dennison: I am happy to share the origins of the multi-agency group, what happened, what we achieved and what happened afterwards.

The Deputy Chairperson (Ms Forsythe): Thank you.

Mr Gildernew: Picking up on that, it seems as though the Departments all decided to work really sensibly together during COVID and then, once it was over, decided to stop all that. There is merit in doing the simple things and doing them well.

My question was going to be on the statutory duty to prevent homelessness, but you have made it clear that you think that that would be beneficial. I appreciate that. I am working on a private Member's Bill on intervention to address homelessness, and the two go hand in hand.

I will ask another question. Two weeks ago, we heard from DFC officials that the Minister is of the view that the right-to-buy scheme should remain in place. What is your view of that scheme, and do you think that it should be ended, amended or even suspended?

Ms McCrudden: To speak from the perspective of Homeless Connect, I will say that we would like to see the end of the right-to-buy scheme and have done for a number of years. If we are not building enough homes, we should not allow social homes to be taken out of use. It is that simple for us.

Mr Dennison: We share that view. At the start of the session, I said that the stock had diminished from 110,000 homes to 83,000. The statutory authority, which was at one time the biggest social landlord in Europe, has been losing stock. We have to pause the scheme, because we are not making up the numbers to replace that stock and to add to what we have. Yes, I absolutely think that we need to end it.

Mr Carroll: I concur with that. Supply is ultimately the issue that will result in our being able to recalibrate and reinvest the money that is spent currently on temporary accommodation and being put into the private sector in particular. Somehow we have to create the space in which that money can be reinvested into a prevention strategy. The haemorrhaging of social housing to outside the system is no longer acceptable.

Mr Gildernew: My final question is on the prevention budgets, which I also raised with officials in our last session. We all agreed that that we are not investing enough in prevention. That is broadly accepted. Given that the budget is reasonably small, any uplift in it could have a significant impact. I raised that in the Communities Committee this morning with finance officials from the Department, and I heard some interesting news on the three-year budgeting and increases in that budget. I certainly welcome any increase. What are your views about the potential for that to happen over a three-year cycle rather than year-to-year? Is the Department engaging with you to ensure that you can scale up should further funding become available — I certainly hope that it does — so that you are in a position to utilise it?

Ms McCrudden: There is huge potential if we have three-year Budgets. I agree that we need further investment. The Housing Executive annually bids to the Department, and I would like to see that annual bid accepted for those three years. As Jim and David said, that would allow us to plan and scale up. Our sector innovates and collaborates really well, so there are huge opportunities for us to work together. That is the way that we work, and the only way that we will prevent homelessness is to work together in a planned and properly resourced way.

You asked whether the Department is engaging with us at the minute. Speaking for Homeless Connect, I can say that I have not had any conversation with departmental officials or the Housing Executive. My staff are asking me, "What happens beyond March? Will we get additional funding, and when do we have to apply for it?".

We are into Christmas now, so you are talking about the last quarter, and, as you all know, that is a really busy time of year for us and for anyone. It will take a good bit of time for us to pull together a three-year funding proposal. We want to make sure that we get it right, because it is for three years.

That is my contribution to that. I do not know whether anybody else wants to come in.

Mr Dennison: I agree. That is spot on.

Mr Honeyford: What are the practical implications of not having that plan? You talked at the start about people, and this is about people. Will you take that a little further by explaining what it would look like on the ground without that funding in place?

Ms McCrudden: We would like to — this is very much the core of our business — work with people who have experience of homelessness. We are talking about people, and I am keen to make sure that the people who have lived and living experience of homelessness are given the opportunity and the time to help to develop innovative solutions. Unless you have walked in someone else's shoes and unless you have experienced homelessness, you are really only commenting on it. That would make a huge difference. It would give us the time to plan programmes, and the people who have lived experience would be involved in developing them.

It is really challenging for us. Some of my board members come from the private sector, and they tear their hair out at times, thinking, "You couldn't run a private-sector business if you sometimes did not know where funding is coming from and how to plan ahead". We have become skilful at juggling. The longer our lead-in time, the better.

That said, programmes do not have to be set in stone. There is a need to be flexible. At a meeting with the Housing Executive, I was pleased to hear its officials say, "It is OK not to do things right and to do things wrong". Part of our culture almost involves blame, so, when it comes to evaluation, members and I want to portray the best possible scenario and the fact that we are doing things really well. However, it should be OK to say, "Do you know what? We tested this, and it didn't work, and this is why it didn't work. In retrospect, we know what to change, and we know how to learn from it". That all takes times, but, at the minute, it does not feel as though we have a lot of time. Again, there is a huge opportunity here. If we get the three-year funding, it is important to make sure that we get it right, but, if it is not right, we need to be flexible enough to change things for the better.

Mr Baillie: I will add one point to that. There was a period in 2024-25 when we were operating on monthly budgets, which was incredibly challenging. That was to do with the fact that voluntary and community sector funding was being pitched against spend on temporary accommodation, which is volatile. When we went to the Minister and said, "This is crippling us. It is really causing us significant issues", to his credit, he addressed it, and we got annual funding. The difference that that made in our organisation was that we were able to recruit staff in a way that we could not when we were operating on those short-time horizons. That is a simple example of the difference that funding cycles can make. We are much more likely to be able to recruit staff on three-year contracts than on short-term contracts.

Ms McCrudden: We hold a lot of vacancies, because we do not know what budget we will end up with at the end of the year. It takes a long time to recruit, so we end up holding vacancies, and that puts additional workload pressure on staff.

Mr Honeyford: May I tease that out? You talked about recruiting staff, but what about the retention of staff? You just talked about people coming from the private sector. Is there an issue not only with recruitment but with the retention of the staff whom you have and the ability to retain their expertise and skill sets? Is that an issue?

Mr Carroll: There are two elements to that. The first is that we cannot keep pace with others. There is the analogy that you would be better off working in Lidl than working for us, because of the huge challenges that come with low pay and recruiting staff.

Foyle Haven in Derry, which is our day centre, has a huge preventative role in identifying street drinkers and early intervention for rough sleepers. This year, for the second year in a row, we got annual funding, but, up to two years ago, we were operating on a quarter-by-quarter basis. That has an effect not only on our staff but on the service users, who say, "Are you going to be here for us in the next couple of months?". We had to tell them that people were on protected notice, for instance. That is the impact of staff saying, "Do you know what? I'd be better off in another sector". People stay because of the love of the work and the commitment to the values of the organisations and to the service user group rather than the salaries. Pay parity has to be an objective for us. A link to public-service awards also has to be an objective, as does the three-year funding cycle.

Mr Dennison: That is not an exceptional situation. I have worked in the community and voluntary sector for a long time. Budgets tend to come late. The Housing Executive allocated £2·5 million to that fund this year, which is fantastic, because it allowed us to do a lot more. The lateness of the DFC announcement meant, as Nicola said, that there was little time to make a good, solid application. Practically speaking, it provided only about six months of spend. We know that that fund, without some kind of recognition, will end on 1 April, so we have to take decisions. Those kinds of pots are so valuable, so we tend to say to people that they are staying with us, and, if they cannot stay in the current fund, we will redeploy them. We simply have to take that gamble.

We received two pots of money from the fund. The Step In and Step Up project involves a specialised support worker working with individuals who are transitioning into their own home. It is specific and time-bound. The purpose of the project is to make sure that those people's tenancy is right from the very start, in the hope that it will not break down. We could do so much more. We hear story after story about people who get their keys and walk into an empty flat, apartment or house, or they have unresolved issues, and their tenancy breaks down really quickly. We want to do prevention work at the outset to make sure that that does not happen and so that people can be set up to succeed. We would love to do more. If we got the nod on three-year funding, we would do a lot more.

Mr Honeyford: Officials told us that, over the past three years, the Housing Executive has made savings — that is how they described it — of £13·8 million. My understanding is that that is money that it did not bid for from the Department, but it was presented as a saving to the public purse. Given everything that you have said — you talked about £2 million or thereabouts, never mind £13·8 million — and everything that we know about the effectiveness of early prevention and intervention, should that £13·8 million have been invested in prevention services, rather than going unspent?

Ms McCrudden: I do not know the detail of that, but, if we are making savings for the public purse, they should then be redirected into prevention schemes. However, I am not fully over the detail of that. Mark might know.

Mr Baillie: I will merely add to that point. If £13·8 million were saved, I would wonder why more of it was not allocated to Supporting People, for example, which has not been able to keep up with inflation. It would be interesting to understand the full detail of that, considering the range of needs across the homelessness sector here. I do not think that you can simply say that there is £13·8 million that could have been spent in a different way: from what I heard two weeks ago, it is more complicated than that. However, if that were the case, there are several things that you could spend it on, such as homelessness prevention, which would be one of the top ones, and the Supporting People programme.

Mr Dennison: I picked up on that number as well. I am not sure whether there is a financial treatment issue in that. I do not know whether that was £13·8 million that was readily available to be put somewhere else or whether it was a saving against a projected target. For example, if you think that something will cost you £50 million and it costs you £36 million, that does not mean that you have saved £14 million; you have still spent £36 million. I do not know where that money has come from, but, if there have been initiatives that have saved money to be redirected elsewhere, that is fantastic. I would love to know what the plan was and how it was saved, because, if that is a real thing, let us save some more and redirect it.

Ms McCrudden: It could be Health money or Justice money.

The Deputy Chairperson (Ms Forsythe): It was stated to us in Committee that that was savings that were made, whereas it felt to us as though it was efficiencies and the money was not then drawn down the following year.

Finally, I want to touch on governance, which, I think, all of you mentioned in your opening remarks. The Audit Office report included some criticism of the homelessness governance. Jim, you read out the catalogue of the governance structure, and it was helpful to have that laid out. I want to speak about two forums: the homelessness strategy steering group and the central homelessness forum. As members of those governance forums, can you give us your assessment of their effectiveness?

Ms McCrudden: The three of us are on the homelessness strategy steering group, and I attend most of its meetings. Everybody who attends those meetings is very committed to ending homelessness and to working together. My question concerns the seniority of officials on the group and their ability or inability to make decisions. Often, they will say that they have to go away and discuss and come back.

Sometimes at those meetings we focus a bit too much on operations as opposed to wider strategic issues. We could work better on that. As I said, the interdepartmental homelessness action plan is non-accommodation-based, which is interesting, because we have the homelessness strategy and the interdepartmental action plan, and there is maybe something about pulling everything together around that.

My final point is on how the group is chaired and governed, which I have mentioned before when I have talked about the possibility of having an independent chair. As Mark said, that is nothing personal — the officials are good at what they do — but, if the Department is creating its own action plan, along with other Departments, to chair and have oversight of it, that is a questionable arrangement for accountability.

The Deputy Chairperson (Ms Forsythe): In your written briefing to the Committee, you call for an independent review of the homelessness governance arrangements. Building on what you have said, across the board, what limitations and issues with the current arrangements would you want that review to consider, and what impact would it have on homelessness? You outlined seniority of officials as one issue, but is there anything else? I am keen to get your feedback on that.

Ms McCrudden: The structure is of local area groups.

Mr Baillie: There are nine of them.

Ms McCrudden: There are nine local area groups, and there is the central homelessness forum. I am not sure how many members are on that forum, but it is sizeable. It tends to be about giving information. Its sheer size means that it is a useful forum, and a lot of really topical issues are discussed on it. It is there to support the implementation of the homelessness action plan. However, it could be improved if more of a task-and-finish approach were taken, and we are working with the Housing Executive on some of that. The strategy is called 'Ending Homelessness Together', and we need to work together. Those task-and-finish groups taking out specific actions in that plan is a good way of working on that.

Mr Carroll: The limitations go back to the power of the group to implement. Whilst the officials are really committed, they do not have the power to bring resources to the table. The interdepartmental piece in particular has not been reviewed since the Programme for Government has been published, and there is a real need for that to occur in order to breathe new life into that. It goes back to the point that we have all consistently made that it needs to be promoted in government and in the Civil Service so that the real decision makers are around the table and can implement the power of their Departments to make real change. We have to get away from the champion situation. There is no mandatory obligation. Nicola made a point about a duty to contribute, and it is essential at this stage to mandate Departments to participate in an overall approach.

Mr Dennison: That tees me up for what I am going to say. My experience of it is that the Department does not have any power to compel other Departments to be at those interdepartmental meetings, and that is why you tend to get a drift. There was a period where I had been to a number of the meetings and the individuals coming in to represent Departments were different people who were coming in at different levels. They had no experience of previous meetings, and they did not have any commitment to come back. That was the first issue.

Departments had committed to doing things from the very outset, and one in particular just said, "No, we are too busy. We are not doing it". That was the Department of Education. Colleagues may remember that, some time ago, we had come up with a plan in which we would try to integrate some understanding of homelessness, how it happens and the support mechanisms in the curriculum. That was a job to do with the Department of Education, which just dropped off the radar. There is that opt-out mechanism, which makes it difficult.

I touched on how the group tends to report on what it is doing rather than on what it is achieving. That goes back to outcomes. You can have as many meetings and do as many things as you want, but you need to know that you are making a difference. I suggest that we move towards outcomes. If we do all this work, what do we expect to see, and how do we know whether we are successful? There is limited time for discussion, because there is a hefty agenda to move through, and it tends to be more on reporting than engaging, so that needs to be reframed. The Audit Office's observations about that are spot on.

The Deputy Chairperson (Ms Forsythe): Absolutely. As you say, you can have all those groups, forums and people talking about all the good work that they do, but you need to have the action coming through. You made an interesting point about the Department of Education. I was just thinking of the Children's Services Co-operation Act (Northern Ireland) 2015, which has not really been brought into force. There is legislation, and we just need to have the buy-in from the right people in the room.

Do any members have further questions?

Mr Burrows: I have just one observation, Chair. I look at the future of potential homelessness and the risk factors. I am on the Committee for Education, and there has been an exponential rise in the number of children with additional complex needs, which would be a risk factor for homelessness. Unless we get a grip on prevention, you are maybe looking at significant challenges in the future.

Mr Dennison: We recently launched our research on childhood adversity. That was a study that was done across different providers on the experience of individuals who were with us at that time and of what happened to them as their lives moved on. For the majority of homeless individuals who are with us now, their homelessness journey started in childhood, because they were unsupported, unloved, mistreated, abused or born into poverty and social exclusion. We clearly see that, if you have a number of those adversities in childhood, you will end up homeless. If we are talking about prevention, as Mark said, we need to get upstream. We need to find and get at those young people quickly. As I said earlier, according to my statistics, more than 19,000 young people are deemed to be legally homeless. If they end up homeless as they move through life, we have an even bigger problem, so you are right to raise that.

Mr Burrows: You spelled out those risk factors, but are there protective factors? Is there data that states, "Actually, if you have the following three or four things, you're less likely to become homeless"?

Mr Dennison: That will be the next part of our study in March, so please come along, and we will share some of that with you. If early interventions or early spotting are needed, whether through an education setting, a health intervention, through the justice system or additional support, we can do that. We now need to tell you what that is, which we will.

The Deputy Chairperson (Ms Forsythe): Does the Treasury Officer of Accounts have any comments?

Mr Stuart Stevenson (Department of Finance): From a Department of Finance perspective, it is important to acknowledge the witnesses' comments. I think that it was Ms McCrudden who coined the phrase that it all comes down to resources.

The other comment that I noted was lack of consistency in funding. In sessions that we have had here over the past year, we have talked about mental health and child poverty, as well as the importance of a multi-year Budget, which is essential. That is certainly not lost on the Department, which is focused on delivering a three-year resource Budget and a four-year capital Budget. There are, no doubt, tough choices for the Executive in the weeks ahead, but we are hopeful at this stage that we will be able to deliver on them. I have worked in public spending for 19 years, and I know that multi-year Budgets do not happen either regularly or often enough, so we need to make the most of that opportunity. We heard about the Committee for Communities and the engagement between it and the finance professionals in that Department. I encourage you to keep up that good work in the window for consultation that lies ahead in the coming weeks and months. That will be essential to long-term success in this area.

The Deputy Chairperson (Ms Forsythe): Thank you very much. Comptroller and Auditor General (C&AG), do you have any comments?

Ms Dorinnia Carville (Northern Ireland Audit Office): No, thank you.

The Deputy Chairperson (Ms Forsythe): Thank you. I want to say a really big "thank you", on behalf of the whole Committee, to Ms McCrudden, Mr Baillie, Mr Dennison and Mr Carroll for attending. The session has been incredibly valuable. As I said at the outset, the Committee wants to get to the heart of the issue and the people who are at the centre of it. Your organisations do great work, and bringing your voices here today has been really important. I thank you, too, Mr Stevenson, and the C&AG for your support for the inquiry.