Mr. Bob Jordan:

A report concerning rent supplement was produced in 2004 by the National Economic and Social Council arguing that we needed 200,000 local authority units by the end of this year and we are nowhere near that. The rent supplement scheme has essentially become a social housing assistance scheme. The problem is that it is run by the Department of Social Protection, which, to be honest, turns a blind eye to the standard of accommodation that people live in and focuses on what is being paid for it. Very often it turns a blind eye to landlords being unregistered, with one in five landlords in receipt of rent supplement not registered with the Private Residential Tenancies Board. This leads to a position where people have the worst of both worlds; they are being asked to manage their own poverty and pay for top-ups in order to keep a roof over their head.

In this budget or soon afterwards the rent supplement scheme should be transferred to the umbrella of local authorities. This would bring about a number of benefits. The local authority would have to ensure accommodation meets good quality standards and that the property is registered with the Private Residential Tenancies Board. As the payment would go directly from the local authority to the landlord, top-up payments would be ruled out. To be fair, something similar has happened under the rental accommodation scheme, which is important.

Rent supplement is a big ticket item in the budget, with a cost of €500 million per year. We have consistently advocated reforms we believe could save money but the Department of Social Protection is refusing to implement them. People in Threshold pick up the telephone every day to call landlords and ask them to reduce rent for tenants with lower rent supplement amounts available to them but the Department has never done that. The top 20 landlords in the country in receipt of rent supplement get between €100,000 and €300,000 each year, so putting one person to work on a telephone for a day could save hundreds of thousands of euro for the Exchequer. Putting two or three people on the same job could save millions of euro but it has never been done. If the Department is not willing to act in such a way, it should not change the limits, as we would be asking the most vulnerable people in the country - those who are facing the prospect of homelessness - to ask landlords for rent reductions. They simply cannot do it.