Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I wish to examine issue of flexibility a little further. Before we suspended for the vote, it was said that the direction given to community welfare officers was to take rents in the area into consideration in terms of deciding what constituted a reasonable rent before breaching the rent allowance cap. Is it possible to see a copy of the memo? Could it be sent to the committee? I am interested in seeing it, not because I doubt Ms Harrington but because there is such a wide diversity in how the advice seems to be interpreted. It would be quite useful for members trying to represent people to have the wording of those guidelines so that we could, as it were, arm people who are going to community welfare officers with precisely what the instructions say in cases where there might be a dispute about the interpretation of discretion or flexibility.

Is the instruction being given to community welfare officers on whether to accept an application dependent on where the person was previously located in an area, in this case where the direction provision centre was? This is a general issue but I seek clarification on it. What I have come across in general is people being told applications are not being accepted because they have no proven link to the area and they are somebody else’s problem. We have had to fight, sometimes successfully, sometimes unsuccessfully, to establish a person’s right to apply for rent assistance in a particular area. Given the chronic lack of affordable rental accommodation, that is a crazy situation. I would have thought it applied very much to people coming out of direct provision trying to find what is very difficult, namely, affordable rental accommodation that accepts rent allowance. It seems to me that we must have great flexibility at that level as well. In other words, regardless of where somebody has been in a direct provision centre, if he or she could find accommodation anywhere that would accept him or her, he or she should be able to go to the community welfare officer in the area and ask for rent allowance and for permission to breach the cap because the accommodation in question is all he or she can find. Could Ms Harrington comment on that point also?