Jan O'Sullivan (Limerick City, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Housing authorities already manage their rent systems in accordance with existing good practice, the development of which involved the Department and the County and City Managers Association. These guidelines deal comprehensively with the various aspects of rent management through rent assessment, collection and accounting and have a particular emphasis on rent arrears prevention and recovery. The guidelines seek to strike a balance between being overly general and overly prescriptive, with some of the action checklists provided being relevant to larger authorities only and others being more relevant to rural authorities which have a more dispersed stock of dwellings. These guidelines have worked well over the years and I do not see any necessity to place them on a statutory basis.

Recent and proposed legislation significantly improves the framework within which housing authorities deal with rent arrears. Section 38 of the Housing (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 2009 provides for rescheduling arrangements between housing authorities and households for the repayment of rent arrears at a rate which households can afford and, in practice, for revised rescheduling arrangements where households cannot keep up repayments due to circumstances beyond their control. In addition, the proposals in the Bill for direct deduction of rent from social welfare payments, which we will come to later, will significantly reduce the incidence and amount of rent arrears for housing authorities, enabling them to focus resources on helping the much reduced number of households which, for whatever reason, fail in future to keep up with their rent payments. We have a code which operates well. In the new system there will be direct deduction which should largely address most of the problems of rent arrears which exist.