Ms Rosalind Carroll:

That is in regard to the HFA. That does not take account of other lenders or any input they would have had themselves. Some of the bodies will have put in some of their own finance. When we looked at the sector last year and conducted global accounts in respect of tier 3, which are the larger AHBs with more than 300 units, €46 million in funding from private finance or loan money had been drawn down at that time. We would expect a rapid increase from regulation. Regulation enables more supply of social housing. Our overall objective is to enable further supply and to protect tenants. We have launched our annual report which gives an overview of what the sector looks like as well as how it is performing in terms of further delivery. As I mentioned in my opening remarks, we have started our second cycle of assessments. Out of that we will launch another annual report in which we should be able to show what progress has been made in terms of the overall money that has come in by looking at the accounts of all the bodies. We should be able to show how much additional output there has been from the sector. We hope to have that report in another three or four months when we have accumulated and assessed all the returns in respect of 2014. We will be able to tell the committee about it at that time.

Senator Keane asked why only 82% of the housing agencies have signed up. This issue has been raised before. Regulation was first introduced only in February 2014, so we are quite pleased with the progress that has been made to date. We reckon there are more than 500 bodies. While we have 82% of the stock, there are still a number of bodies if only 210 of them have signed up. We have all the tier 3 bodies, which are bodies with more than 300 units, signed up. This represents about 80% of the stock. Many of the smaller bodies have signed up but some others have not. We have started to review those. We think that many of the bodies that have not signed up are non-developing bodies or bodies that may be inactive at this time. Sometimes people apply for approved housing status but may never take on units and may still have a status attached that will not have been reviewed and taken down. Other bodies, because they are not developing, may not have signed up to take on units. One of the conditions now if a body wants to access State funding from the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government is that the funding is prioritised based on sign-up to regulation to the voluntary code. Any body that is accessing new moneys is signed up to our code. However, there is still work for us to do in trying to identify other bodies. We will continue to do that through newsletters and promote the code as much as possible in the voluntary framework that is in place.

In terms of interventions and what is necessary, in the first cycle of assessments we did last year, we would have identified 17 bodies out of the 142 where we said further engagement was necessary. That further engagement could have been where we required them to clarify a piece of information around their governance or it could have been that, having looked at their accounts, we would have seen that they had been running at a deficit for two years. We were worried about an organisation in that position and wanted to find out what it was doing about it. That is a typical example of some of the issues we found. We found some of the smaller, tier 1 bodies with fewer than 50 units were struggling in terms of board membership. They may have been set up ten or 20 years ago and had the required number of board members but now they were in a rural community and had only two or three board members. For good governance they needed to have a full board.

We are not there to criticise them but to support them, to see what way the issue can be addressed and how they are looking to address it. Issues are also referred to us directly so, apart from our work assessing bodies, some bodies will refer issues to us. Issues have been referred to us regarding conflicts of interest and governance where members of a board are being paid, which is against our code as one should not be on a board if one is being paid. There have been various different issues but everybody has positively engaged with us thus far and they have followed the steps we have recommended to them.

Deputy Cowen brought up the issue of tenant purchase and hopefully I have dealt with that. I am not sure what I can add to the question on the adoption of nursing home schemes. Mr. O'Leary may be able to give further information on that.