Fingal needs to speed up its process for deciding whether people should get social housing faster for medical reasons, councillors say

Fingal must review its process for deciding whether people should get social housing faster for medical reasons, councillors agreed at their monthly meeting on Monday.

To decide whether a person applying for social housing gets “medical priority”, the council’s chief medical officer considers the health of a person suffering from a chronic illness or disability and whether this will significantly deteriorate unless they are housed, according to Fingal County Council.

And right now, it can take up to two years for a person’s request for medical priority to be processed, Sinn Féin Councillor Angela Donnelly said in a motion, asking for the Chief Executive AnnMarie Farrelly to review the council’s current procedures with a view to streamlining them.

The process has already “undergone significant review in recent months and work to deal with significant numbers of applications received in recent years”, wrote Paul Carroll, Fingal’s director of services in its Housing and Community Development department, in his response to Donnelly.

A number of initiatives were brought in to assist in the progression of an application in a timely manner, Carroll wrote, like a screening process before applications go to the Medical Welfare Committee, and that committee meeting more frequently.

Currently, the council receives about 60 applications for medical priority per month, he said. And “the wait time is reducing considerably”, Carroll wrote.

Still, the response given to applications isn’t good enough, said Donnelly, the councillor, before reading out a letter to an applicant living in the Dublin 15 area telling them they would not get medical priority.

“‘This decision is based on the assessment of your medical documentation in line with the housing allocation scheme’”, Donnelly said, quoting the letter. “After waiting eleven months for a response, this is the extent of the information people receive.”

If they aren’t given more information, they’re obviously going to appeal the decision, she said. “This results in more staff resource time used to deal with those appeals.”

All of this could be done a lot more efficiently to reduce the work, she said, “and save the residents a lot of heartache and distress”.

Sixty applications per month isn’t an extraordinary figure for anyone working in the medical profession, said Independents4Change Councillor Dean Mulligan. “It just beggars belief that two years is the timeline.”

Labour Councillor John Walsh said he receives a lot of feedback about the process being slow and cumbersome. “Inadvertently that’s causing a lot of hardship.”

Carroll said the council had recently engaged a second doctor, which has doubled their capacity, “and they’re supported by a team of people within our Housing Department who undertake a screening process, which looks at things from a non clinical perspective where that’s possible”.

Donnelly’s motion – “That the Chief Executive conducts a review of the current medical priority process with a view to streamlining it” – was agreed.