Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

We are tripping up on this. Mr. John McCarthy is the Accounting Officer and I want him to provide a detailed note of the situation with regard to the assets and liabilities of the Housing and Sustainable Communities Agency. I ask him to send us on a note because five years after the agency was established, it is extraordinary that we are having such a discussion at this point. Leaving aside the Comptroller and Auditor General, the primary responsibility to produce the accounts lies with the company. The Comptroller and Auditor General is only the auditor.

There is a board of directors and it is its responsibility to know those things in the first place. The Comptroller and Auditor General will audit it after they have signed off their accounts. I ask for a note on that and on the uncollected non-principal private residence issue we mentioned.

I have a last topic to mention. I apologise, but these are all specific issues that have crossed my desk as a Deputy. I put down a parliamentary question on this last year and Mr. McCarthy might have seen correspondence from me on it. It relates to the local authority mortgage protection insurance scheme. In my constituency - and this is reflected everywhere - the cost of the local authority mortgage protection insurance scheme, which every person with a housing loan must join, is three or four times more expensive than what is available in the private market to people who do not have their loans with a local authority. It is not 2% or even 30% more expensive, it is 300% to 400% more expensive. In the private market, it was made illegal years ago for the mortgage provider to force the mortgage holder to take out mortgage protection insurance with that company. Customers are free to shop around. Seemingly, what is good for 85% of the population does not seem to be good enough for those who have loans from the local authority. They are still being obliged legally to have mortgage protection insurance with the scheme.

That is a point but the real point is that it is several hundred percent dearer than what is available in the private sector. When people run into arrears and one seeks to negotiate with a finance officer, one sees what looks like a phenomenal amount of mortgage protection insurance compared to what one deals with where a person owes money to a bank. It is utterly unfair. I know Mr. McCarthy will tell me there is extra coverage, that it covers a person until he or she is 65 and that if he or she dies, he or she gets €3,000 extra. I know what the benefits are from the reply to the parliamentary question and correspondence from the Housing Finance Agency. The most recent reply I received from the Minister last year stated that as part of the upcoming retendering process, the relevant committee would seek to secure with effect from 1 January 2017 the most appropriate insurance cover at the best value for money for local authority borrowers. I ask Mr. McCarthy to provide the committee with a detailed assessment of the improvements made to the scheme which were achieved on 1 January 2017.

I have asked the Department to give me the detail of how much money has been collected in the scheme and how much has been paid out. That has not been provided. The Department said it was not its affair. I have written to the Housing Finance Agency which says it does not have the information either. I have written to the local government managers' association or whatever the group involved is and it said it did not have the information. I am told the mortgage protection insurance scheme protection committee cannot provide it. It is a sub-committee of the City and County Management Association which cannot provide me with the information. The local authorities obviously do not have it and the Housing Finance Agency has not been able to provide that information. The Department is on that also. Despite PQs, the Department cannot provide this information. What is the total amount paid by local authority mortgage holders for mortgage protection insurance for each of the last couple of years and what payouts have been made? They are being severely penalised because they have nowhere to go. If they get a loan from the agency, they are forced to get this insurance. It is not fair.

The Department says the current underwriter is Generali PanEurope with Marsh Ireland acting as its insurance administrator. The PQ reply says that financial information specific to the operation of the local authority MPI project is commercially sensitive. We want to lift that veil of commercial sensitivity. The Department knows what I am looking for. I do not accept the answer I was given. How many people have local authority mortgages in the country under regular mortgages and shared-ownership mortgages schemes, approximately? Somebody across from me must know. How many local authority mortgages are out there?