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

They will facilitate us to house families for 20 years over the lifetime of a lease. That is a significant length of time. I take the Deputy's point that we need to keep the matter under review and that we cannot keep on leasing more and more properties without examining the ongoing cost to the State and we will do this. For the moment, it is considered to be a cost-effective way of housing families and we must respond to those who need housing. Even if we were to begin a large construction programme today, we would not have houses available for a number of years. I managed to secure €10 million for this year and with the money we are going to purchase units for people with disabilities. We are looking at different ways of acquiring units. Leasing will continue to be a part of our programme. Obviously, leasing from NAMA is one element and we want to ensure we take the best advantage of the available NAMA units. This can be done either through using the voluntary sector or directly with local authorities. I recently contacted the local authorities to ask them to specifically look for NAMA units that might be available in their areas to provide housing because we want to get the best possible social dividend from NAMA.

That brings me to the point made by Deputy Catherine Murphy because many NAMA units are in the areas about which she spoke - Kildare, Dublin and Cork - in which there is very large waiting lists. If NAMA units are available, they should be acquired for social housing. The Deputy gave me the statistic of 43% before. I am very conscious of it and think we need to ensure we address the difficulties in local authority areas with the largest waiting lists. We engage with local authorities a couple of times a year at least to ensure we discuss with them how we can target their waiting lists. I have written to them in respect of NAMA units.

Deputy Catherine Murphy raised a number of other issues. My colleague, the Minister for Social Protection, has altered the rental caps and made them more favourable in certain areas.

On the point made by Deputies Paudie Coffey and Catherine Murphy, we are progressing in moving people in receipt of long-term rent supplement to the local authorities. We will have another memorandum to the Cabinet soon and hope to be in a position, subject to the legislation going through, where we will be able to pilot the programme early next year and then move to a general roll-out. It will integrate the very large cohort on rent supplement into the general social housing waiting lists. That will be an improvement for all kinds of reasons.

In respect of obtaining value for money on purchases, the extra €10 million for people with disabilities will involve the direct purchase of houses. It was suggested buying houses might be a good way to achieve value for money. Realistically, because we are asking local authorities to come back with proposals on how they can spend the €10 million this year, we expect that there will be purchases, but they will specifically be for people with disabilities.

A few members raised the issue of private grants. We are carrying out a review and want to ensure we get the best possible value for money with the amount available. Again, there will be a small extra amount of money available this year. I know some people felt their particular local authority was short of money. We will have a small extra allocation that we have managed to find this year and will be able to allocate fairly soon. We ask local authorities to keep schemes open. Deputy Catherine Murphy referred to a particularly difficult case. We ask them to keep schemes open where there might be emergencies. We do not want them to close them at a particular time. While people may have been disappointed with last year's allocation, it was allocated in a very fair and transparent way and one could see exactly why certain local authorities had received the amount of money they did.

We have introduced what we call a housing-led approach to homelessness. It is based on all of the information and research we can obtain, whereby it is much more cost-effective and better for the individual if one can get him or her into a home as quickly as possible, with the support he or she needs rather than having him or her stay long term in what is meant to be short-term urgent crisis accommodation. We are gradually moving towards that scheme, while at the same time ensuring we have hostel accommodation available for persons who are on the streets. There has been a small increase in the number presenting as emergency homeless, that is, people on the streets. We are working with the various homeless fora. There is a devolved system under which, for example, in Dublin there is a homeless forum which caters for the vast majority of homeless persons in the country. We meet them regularly. I have set up an oversight group consisting of three individuals whose job it is to monitor what we all do to make sure we are being effective in terms of achieving results for people who are homeless because I must ensure value for money is obtained. I have brought up the issue of the unit referred to by Deputy Humphreys with the Dublin forum, in particular, because we want to ensure any money available spent is spent appropriately. That does present a difficulty in the sense that where people might have been living in a hostel for two years, our aim is to get them out of that hostel as quickly as possible and in a much shorter period of time than two years and support them in their homes.

We have schemes that offer supports, mainly through voluntary sector organisations such as Simon and Focus Ireland, and research shows that these are effective.

Deputy Kevin Humphreys also raised the issues of homelessness and Traveller accommodation. Again, I recently met a consultative committee on the latter issue. One of the problems with moneys allocated for the provision of Traveller accommodation is that they are not always spent in the year in which they are allocated. Unfortunately, if the moneys are not spent in the year in which they are allocated, they cannot be rolled over, except in certain situations. We must ensure they are spent effectively. That is why having Travellers on these consultative committees is important to ensure we respond to their accommodation needs.

I do not have details for the average cost per unit of voluntary housing. We get good value for money in working with the voluntary sector. We will have a voluntary regulatory system for the organisations working in the area soon and we will move to a statutory regulatory system. They have the potential to raise significant funding outside of the State’s funding. Some of the larger organisations are exploring various ways in which they might do this, which would help us to increase the number of units. This will be important in addressing the needs of those on housing waiting lists.

Deputy James Bannon has asked if we could purchase houses in ghost estates for people with disabilities who are on local authority housing lists. If any of them is suitable, local authority housing moneys can be used to purchase them. On ghost estates in general, we have a national committee which has representatives of all the various interests. It is quite complex because there are owners, receivers, bankers and so forth. There can be a whole sector of people involved in any one ghost estate. We are making progress in this area and want to ensure we can make improvements on individual estates.

Deputy James Bannon also raised the issue of clawing back housing adaptation grants. In the review we are undertaking we are examining whether there should be a claw-back of money in cases in which a house was sold shortly after the grant money was spent on it.