For people who miss a letter and lose their place on the social housing list, there may be an appeals process at last

Sarah Stephens grew up in state care and struggled with her mental health, she said. 

She joined the Dublin City Council housing list in 2007, she said. To get in the long queue to wait for a home, a permanent place to land, with a rent based on her income. 

But in 2013, when she had severe depression – having given birth to a full-term stillborn baby – she failed to return a form to the council to confirm she was still eligible to be on the list, she said. 

The next year, she later said, she found out she was no longer on the housing list.

Stephens was far from alone in finding herself in this situation. 

Between 2016 and 2019, nationally, 42 percent of housing applications that were closed did so not because the person got a social home but because of a failure to communicate, according to a report commissioned by The Housing Agency, published last year. 

In 2024, 29 percent of housing applications to councils across the country – for 5,626 households – were closed due to the applicant’s failure to communicate with the councils, according to a Department of Housing spokesperson. 

In the Dublin City Council area in particular, 15 percent of households removed from the housing list last year were taken off because of a failure to communicate, according to a council spokesperson.

Some people who don’t return a form to the council might no longer be eligible for social housing. Still, though, the numbers being disqualified for dropping communication with their council are surprisingly high, experts say. 

“It is very striking,” says University College Dublin Professor Michelle Norris, who authored the 2025 report for The Housing Agency with a postdoctoral researcher Clíodhna Bairéad.

And there are concerns that vulnerable households are likely to be disproportionately affected – those with mental-health issues or poor literacy could miss the form. 

This also happens to people living in homeless accommodation, according to Ber Grogan, executive director of the Simon Communities of Ireland, and Paul Dornan, managing solicitor at Mercy Law Resource Centre. 

Homeless housing applicants have at times been removed from the social housing list while living in emergency accommodation provided by the council, they say. 

For her part, when she found out she’d been removed from the housing list, Sarah Stephens tried to appeal – but it didn’t work.

“I tried to fight it, but they said it was pointless trying to fight it or appeal it because you will get nowhere,” she said.

Now, though, the government is set to introduce a new statutory appeals process for social housing applicants soon as part of the Housing (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill, says a spokesperson for the Department of Housing. 

Different council processes

Housing regulations introduced in 2011 allow councils to reassess social housing applications, but don’t prescribe how they should go about that, says Dornan, of Mercy Law Resource Centre. 

Each council has a different process for communication. Some try harder than others to contact the applicant before taking them off the housing list. 

Fingal County Council writes out to applicants and then sends a reminder, a spokesperson for that council said. 

“If no response is received, the Council contact the applicant by phone and, if applicable, by email,” the spokesperson said.

For Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council, 10 percent of the applications it closed last year were due to failure to communicate, a spokesperson for that council said. 

Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown sends a letter and a reminder by post, and staff will also phone if they are aware the applicant is vulnerable, the spokesperson said.  

South Dublin County Council writes to the applicants and also posts out a reminder, a spokesperson for that council said. 

Meanwhile, Dublin City Council writes to applicants three times, sending the form they need to fill out together with a freepost envelope, a spokesperson for that council said.  

“Dublin City Council make every effort to ensure that contact is made with applicants with the most up-to-date information they have provided on their housing file,” the spokesperson said. 

Councillors on Dublin City Council’s housing committee asked the council a few years ago to text housing applicants, as well as writing to them, independent Councillor Cieran Perry said. 

Perry has had two cases recently where people were removed from the council’s housing waiting list, he says. A lot of people are affected by it, says Perry. 

In Fingal, Sinn Féin Councillor John Smyth says he has had cases of people surprised to learn that they had been removed from the list and adamant they had not received a letter and form in the post. 

Some people who are removed from their local housing list were in regular contact with the council, says Louise Bayliss, spokesperson for Single Parents Acting for the Rights of Kids (SPARK).  

“We have come across lone parents who have said that despite constant contact, phoning the council every month, they were shocked to find they had been removed from the social housing list,” she said. 

Many people say they did not receive the letter the council says they failed to respond to. “I find it hard to believe that anyone would ignore a housing letter,” Bayliss says. 

“With something so serious, you would wonder if it should be registered post,” says Smyth, the Sinn Féin councillor in Fingal. “I can’t help but be cynical about this and believe that it's a procedure that is used to shorten the housing list.”

Lost in homeless accommodation

Since people living in homeless accommodation are placed there by the council, they might assume that council staff know where they are living. 

And that council staff would look on the national database for homeless accommodation, PASS, before removing a person from the housing list. 

However, some say that doesn’t always happen in practice. 

Dornan, of Mercy Law Resource Centre, says they have advocated for housing applicants who were removed from social housing waiting lists while staying in emergency accommodation.

“The local authority should know where the person is staying,” he says. “They should be able to check the PASS system.”

Councils should have systems that work to contact homeless people if they need to verify their ongoing need for, and eligibility for, social housing, says Grogan, at Simon Communities. 

People experiencing homelessness often move around a lot, making it “very likely that they will miss the postal letter requiring a response”, Grogan says. “It is an outdated and ill-fitting way of verifying a person's need.” 

“People spend years and years on waiting lists for a secure and stable home,” says Grogan. “It is completely unfair if they are then taken off the list because of an outdated administrative practice.”

While people who are homeless might not reply to a council letter because it didn’t reach them wherever they are, other vulnerable people might not be aware of the consequences of failing to return the form, says Dornan. 

So too says Norris, the UCD professor and author of the 2025 report. “At the least, an equality assessment is needed to ascertain if the most vulnerable applicants are most affected by this.”

A spokesperson for Dublin City Council says people who are homeless, people who are in hospital, and older people are not removed from their housing list for failing to reply to letters.

“Social Housing applications from applicants, including applicants who are in emergency accommodation, hospitals, health care facilities and also older persons on the waiting list are exempt from the housing needs assessment,” the spokesperson said. 

Can they get back on?

Not all of the 5,626 households who were removed from council social housing waiting lists nationwide in 2024 were permanently scrubbed from lists, the Department of Housing spokesperson said. 

“Where a number of attempts to contact a household fail to elicit a response, authorities are advised that it is not unreasonable to then close the household’s application,” the spokesperson said. 

“However, local authorities are also advised that should the household subsequently respond with the information required within a reasonable time, the application could be re-activated,” he said.

Indeed, Sinn Féin TD Eoin Ó Broin, his party’s spokesperson on housing, says that in his experience – mostly dealing with South Dublin County Council – if the closure was recent, the applicant can often get their position restored. 

In the past, there was a fairly widespread issue, says Ó Broin, because rent supplement tenants got a form stamped by the council for their rent supplement claim. A lot of people thought that meant the council knew they had changed address, he says. 

But it did not. They were also required to fill out a change-of-address form, so in those cases the council was then writing to the wrong address and the applicants were removed from the list. “Most of the cases I deal with are from back then,” says Ó Broin.

Madeleine Johansson, an independent councillor on South Dublin County Council, says she thinks that between 2016 and 2019 there was a push to reduce the numbers on the housing lists and councils were reassessing the entire housing list every year. 

“If it gets lost in the post or for one reason or another you don’t get it, you get removed, which is just madness,” she says. 

Some people who don’t respond might no longer be eligible, says Johansson – they might have left the country or exceeded the income limit – but, she says, most are still eligible and still need homes. 

Johansson says she knows one applicant who was removed from the list and struggled to get their position restored. 

They had updated the council with their new address, but the council had still written to them at their old address, she says. 

After a long battle, though, the applicant got back onto their original position, she says. 

There will soon be an appeals process available to all social housing applicants who don’t agree with a council decision, said the Department of Housing spokesperson. 

“Government approval has been secured to prepare legislation to introduce a statutory appeals process for decisions relating to assessments for social housing as part of a suite of amendments to the 2009 Housing Act,” he said. 

Those provisions are being drafted and should be brought to the government “for approval to publish in the coming weeks”, he said.

The Department of Housing didn’t respond to follow-up queries as to whether there would be a time limit for appealing decisions. 

Dornan said he welcomed the promise of an appeals process. 

“Mercy Law Resource Centre has been calling for an independent appeals mechanism for years for social housing applicants and people who are homeless,” Dornan said. 

“There is a fundamental unfairness with there being no appeals process for something that is so impactful on people’s lives,” he said.