The homeless and housing charity, Peter McVerry Trust, intends to more than double its housing provision to 450 by 2020.The charity’s five-year strategy plan, launched yesterday, focuses on the housing needs of vulnerable young people leaving institutional care settings and those with complex needs.
Chief executive of the trust, Pat Doyle, said they currently had 165 housing units, 350 shelter beds and 90 hostel beds but now wanted to focus on a long-term solution.
“When we are launching our next strategic plan in five years’ time we want to have more housing units than shelter beds.
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“We are not reducing the shelter beds because they are still needed
at the moment but the emphasis will be on housing,” said Mr Doyle.Last year the charity provided 4,221 residential places and helped 171 people to exit homelessness. Of the people supported, 81% were struggling with drug addiction while 60% had a mental health problem.
The average age of individuals supported by the charity is 31, and 74% are male.
Mr Doyle said doubling its housing provision would mean it could play a significant role in the delivery of Housing First, a model for tackling homelessness adapted from the Pathways to Housing created by homeless expert Sam Tsembis.
The model has been widely used in the US and, more recently, has been adopted by homeless agencies in Australia, Canada, Japan and throughout Europe.
It focuses on the immediate provision of long term/permanent accommodation for the homelessness, with supports and services built around the needs of each individual.
“At present, we have a major Housing First programme with rough sleepers. Our aim now is to extend this approach to target young people and people leaving prisons and hospitals,” he said.
Mr Doyle said young people from severely deprived areas, where there were high rates of early school leaving and no proper supports to access education, training and employment, were particularly vulnerable to homelessness.
“Since we published our last strategic plan in 2011 child and youth homelessness has increased by more than 200%.
“These children and young adults are severely impacted by homelessness, and we need to rapidly rehouse them before they become damaged or institutionalised by the system.”
Mr Doyle said it took the charity about eight years to build up to 165 housing units, but the trust had developed a lot of expertise in this area since then.
“Eleven years ago we began to ramp up our housing programme.
At the time we had 24 beds, two apartments and 13 staff.”
Mr Doyle said the charity would spend around €15m this year providing accommodation and care for homeless people.