Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

On the child and family income supplement, following the large amount of detailed, informative and good work that the Mangan group has undertaken, we have arrived at a general agreement to support families with children and, in particular, the activation of proposals.

We are maintaining the child benefit system. What we have significantly increased levels of funding this year and last for family income supplement as people go back to work. My proposal is to continue that policy and as I said earlier to have the additional payment to families with children who have been unemployed. That work is ongoing. Senator Moloney raised a number of valid questions and we will take them into consideration as the work on the scheme is being planned. That is the reform path.

Child benefit payments are a significant payment to families, many of whom are in the age cohort of those who are troubled by mortgage debt. Cash flow is very important to the budget of those families, particularly those with two or more children. Child benefit is paid to families irrespective of whether they are in work or out of work and is paid directly to the caring parent. I propose to continue with the child benefit payment structure. A very important feature of the payment is that the cash flow is getting to the children.

We have revised the family income supplement scheme. It is now working in a much faster and better way than was the case before the improvements to IT. I hope the qualified child increase changes, whereby people will retain a portion of them over a period of time as a working family dividend, will be attractive. I am conscious of the fact that we have roughly 80,000 people on the live register. In the main these are men who lost their jobs during the construction collapse or lost jobs in areas related to construction and many of those men are in family relationships with children. I hope that this will be a significant assistance to that group of people, as we see the construction industry slowly but surely increasing its activity levels.

We are reviewing the rent caps at present. On previous occasions I spoke to Deputies O'Dea and Ó Snodaigh about the emergency protocol which came officially into force during June. That has worked very well. At this point, more than 100 cases that we know about have been addressed and sorted out in relation to rent increases by landlords. A number of parliamentary questions have been tabled on this topic, but the outcome is working very well. I know that Deputy O'Dea on a previous occasion spoke about it being extended to Limerick. I understand the community welfare officers in Limerick are pretty much available to apply the same system. There has not been anything like the number of cases there as in Dublin but again, there is an intervention to support a family with a difficulty with their landlord.

As I have said, the way to address this difficulty in the short or medium-term is to increase the housing supply. We have had extensive discussions with Dublin City Council on ending the policy of boarding up vacant houses and putting the contents of the house or the apartment in a skip. If we can bring those apartments and houses back into the available housing stock for families, it will assist a significant number of people over the remainder of this year and the first half of the next year.