Denis Landy (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the officials. I also welcome all of the initiatives brought forward by the Government to deal with the housing problem. However, I would like to put a number of questions. Mr. Layde has said the rent limit review will feed into the budgetary process. Will an adjustment to the limits be ready for introduction in the budget in October?
I refer to the HAP and the shift in social policy, as it was described by Deputy Catherine Murphy, vis-á-visthe housing of applicants by local authorities. Has anybody consulted an applicant on a housing waiting list about this? Up to now, people applied for a local authority house to become a local authority tenant to live on a local authority estate and aspire to buying that house and using it to move or to make their family life in it. It seems the Department has proposed the opposite. A scheme is being introduced which will not provide security of tenure for participants and which will take no account of the fact that landlords sign up to timescales that suit them. Many of them have mortgaged houses and if the market picks up, they may sell them, which would mean the tenant no longer having accommodation. What does the scheme provide for tenants in improving their quality of life? That is an important issue.
I welcome the provision of mechanisms in legislation to deal with serious breaches of tenancy agreements.

I would also like to ask about how it will operate in the local authorities. All town councils are gone as of 1 June. With regard to all of the local knowledge that was in those town councils across the country, how has that been transferred to the county level, which now deals with housing, or has any work been done on it? I have made inquiries and done some research on this at national level only to discover that, in many cases, the people who dealt with housing at town council level have not been consulted and there has been no handover process of a massive volume of local knowledge. How are we going to handle that?

I want to refer to the pilot project under way in Limerick. The last line in the paragraph states that the lessons learned from the pilots will be vital. Have we learned any lessons yet? If so, will the witnesses give us some detail on that?

With regard to the tenant purchase scheme which is imminent, we are awaiting further information. Will the witnesses give us what information they can on the detail of the tenant purchase scheme? Despite the state of the economy, many people are interested in that scheme and are anxious to find out what exactly we are going to provide in it.

I welcome the work being done on void houses. It is very important we turn around houses as quickly as possible. We are not and have not been doing that, for what reason I do not know. In my own local authority area, houses are simply boarded up and left there. Nobody can give an answer as to why they are not used. Will the witnesses give us the number of houses involved? Can they tell us how many void houses there are in total in the country?

With regard to the completion of the 952 units, it was confirmed that the second round of 850 will be completed in 2015. When will the 952 be completed?