Ms Mary Heavey:

On foot of our preliminary review of Part 2 of the general scheme, we find that the proposals are unworkable, unclear, unduly harsh and restrictive and may give rise to violations of EU law. Our general view, which is shared by many of our colleagues in other legal and advocacy groups who are not here today, is that these proposals should not proceed in their present form.

Our initial and non-exhaustive concerns about the general scheme are as follows: first, we are concerned that it is not compatible with EU law. The proposals do not fully reflect EU freedom of movement of law, in that they fail to distinguish between EEA citizens exercising free movement rights as workers, as against those exercising free movement rights generally. This is a potentially fatal flaw in the general scheme. Second, we have concerns about the legal and practical implications of the general scheme’s proposal to adopt the concept of the habitual residence condition from section 246 of the Social Welfare Consolidation Act 2005. The HRC in the social welfare context is highly complex.

That stated, expert decision-makers are experienced in dealing with the HRC and there is a formal appeals infrastructure through the social welfare appeals office. The general scheme does not provide for any equivalent appeals mechanism, so it appears that this complex determination will be made by local authority housing staff who have no expertise in this area and without any appeals infrastructure equivalent to that in the social welfare context.

I am conscious of time so I will just flag that we have identified other concerns in our opening statement, such as the requirement in the general scheme that this may be a precursor to the eligibility assessment generally and also that the mandatory application of eligibility criteria to all household members may have unduly harsh and restrictive consequences.

Finally, I would like to flag that we are gravely concerned about the potential impact on eligibility for homelessness services. Access to homeless services is governed by a separate legislative regime and while the general scheme is silent on its application to homelessness services, in our experience, local authorities often conflate the systems. We are particularly concerned about this in light of a memo from the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage to the national homeless action committee which came to our attention last year. That memo proposed to radically overhaul homelessness law, including legislating for a right to reside and habitual residence conditions for access to both social housing supports and emergency accommodation. We, along with many of our colleagues, some of whom are here today, made robust submissions to the Department on this memo but we have not yet received an update on those proposals.

These issues really highlight the complexity of introducing any residency condition into the social housing support framework. We urge the committee to undertake to engage in robust and comprehensive consultation and scrutiny with all relevant stakeholders to ensure that any appropriate legislative approach is fully informed. We are happy to address any questions the committee may have. I thank members for their attention.