Child homelessness
Deputy Murphy warns that child homelessness is causing lasting trauma and asks what new action will be taken. The Minister says homelessness remains the number one housing challenge and points to family exits from emergency accommodation and rising social housing output.
Homelessness costs an absolute fortune, but there is another cost and it is building trauma into children's lives and life experiences. As we know, the more adverse childhood experiences a child has, the more it impacts his or her life expectancy, health and educational attainment, missing milestones for babies and so on. This is a tribunal of the future. It is costing more and getting worse, and it has become normalised. Now we talk about numbers every month. What will the Minister specifically do to address child homelessness that is more than he is doing at the moment? Does he have any new specific strategies to deal with child homelessness?
Comment on this
Just before Leaders' Questions, we had an hour and a half of questions on housing, many of which related to the situation of those in homeless emergency accommodation. As I said in reply to Deputies then, it remains the number one challenge we have. I have engaged directly with our local authorities with regard to allocations and, particularly, allocating families permanent social homes to enable people to exit emergency accommodation. In quarter 2 this year, 630 families exited emergency accommodation into safe and secure homes. We see a continued increase in social housing output. Last year, we built 8,110 new social homes and delivered more than 11,000 in total, and we will do more than that this year. It is very important we do that. They are the permanent solutions for people, but homelessness is complex. Looking at the data we publish every month, there are many reasons people come into emergency accommodation. Our job is to make sure that they are supported when that happens and can exit as quickly as possible from that situation, with a particular focus on children.