Mr. Justin O'Brien:

It can happen that a family increases and says it is overcrowded. The context is that but for the AHB and the local authority, there is not much available stock for transfer. It is a problem. Some of that is capacity. Sometimes what tenants do, and public representatives advise them to do it, when they want to go from one location to another, to downsize or upsize, is arrange a mutual transfer with the sanction of the AHB and the local authority. We have done that numerous times. Each person would interview the potential new tenant and agree, work out that there are no rent arrears or that an anti-social tenant is not being transferred from one place to another. There is a process. The biggest problem for us all, even within our own stock, is that if families increase in size, the capacity to transfer them from a small to a large unit is limited. In most local authorities and AHBs, the turnover of tenancies is very limited. Therefore, the capacity is limited to enable the situation the Deputy outlines.