1,900 applicants are struck off Galway City’s housing list

By Dara Bradley

 Some 1,900 applicants are to be scratched from the city’s local authority’s housing waiting list overnight, the Sentinel has learned.

A Housing Need Assessment (HNA) started in April is now complete and in the region of 1,900 applicants for social housing, including individuals and families, will be taken off the list.

Before the audit, which was compulsory, Galway City Council’s housing waiting list stood at just over 5,000 – the highest ever in the history of the city’s housing waiting lists.

This has been slashed to just over 3,000 following what the Council described as an “extensive and comprehensive trawl” of those on the list.

Letters are being sent out to some 1,900 applicants over the coming days informing them that they are no longer considered to have a housing need.

The Council had instigated the audit in order to verify the numbers of people on the list – it wrote to over 5,000 people asking them to fill out forms as part of the Housing Need Assessment.

Yesterday, a City Council spokesperson said that 3,100 of the people who replied were deemed to have a housing need and they will remain on the list. The vast majority of the 1,900 applicants who are to be struck off were people who did not respond to the HNA letters and did not return the forms correctly.

Some of the applicants may have emigrated, others may have passed away.

The city’s mayor, Councillor Terry O’Flaherty welcomed the reduction but cautioned that some of those struck off the list may in fact still have a legitimate housing need. 

A City Council spokesperson said that there is a significant amount of “churn” since the last audit carried out in 2007. “That was six years ago and a lot of the people who added their name to the list over those years may have moved on,” he said.

He pointed out that in order to receive rent supplements people must be on the housing waiting list.

A small fraction of the people who are now deemed to be off the waiting list includes those who have had an increase in income and therefore they are no longer deemed eligible.

“That’s only a small number,” the Council spokesperson confirmed. 

 For more, read this week’s Connacht Sentinel.