Mr. John McCarthy:

I will take the questions in turn.

Senator Victor Boyhan has left the meeting, but I will deal with what he said in general terms. It goes back to some of the earlier discussion with Deputy Eoin Ó Broin about information and statistics. I acknowledge the Senator's positive comments on the scale and range of information we have provided. Some of us are here. The rest of the team dealing with housing are back in the Department. There is no one on the team who does not understand the scale of what we have to achieve and the critical priority attached to it. It is of no benefit to us to do anything other than what we have said we would support the Government in delivering. We have outlined what we have achieved. I accept, however, that there has been slippage in some areas.

It was inevitable that this would happen but we have been upfront about what the issues are and how we are trying to deal with them.

Returning to what Deputy Ó Broin said about housing completion statistics, I reinforce the point to the effect that we have no interest in having anything other than the best possible information and statistics as it is only then that we can be sure we have the best informed policy to deal with the reality of the situation.

Senator Boyhan raised the wider issue of dealing with homelessness beyond people needing homes. He was spot on in terms of the extent to which a home is one part of a solution for many people who find themselves homeless but social supports, particularly in the context of evictions and mental health issues, are vital. There is an appendix to Rebuilding Ireland setting out all the actions that will be taken. We are the owners and the lead people to drive the majority of those actions but this must be an across-government strategy if it is to work. The action to which Senator Boyhan referred is led by the Department of Health and the HSE because it relates to the important issue of mental health. That action is marked as incomplete because the commitment is to get to a point where funding for mental health supports and addiction services for homeless people would be increased to €6 million per annum. This year, as services are ramped up, the funding allocation for the services will be €4 million, not €6 million, because some of the provision will come on stream at the end of the year. As a result, there will not be a full-year cost attaching to it. However, the commitment is for the allocation to increase to €6 million next year. That is the reason that action is marked as incomplete, but considerable work is being done in respect of it.

Senator Boyhan also referred to cases of people living in emergency accommodation for far too long. That is recognised, as is the need to deal with the issue under the Housing First approach. People need to be equipped to live as independent a life as they possibly can but for some, that will require having range of supports in place. We have the Housing First programme and there is a separate action in Rebuilding Ireland to triple the number of Housing First tenancies by the end of this year. There are two elements to that, an accommodation element and the wrap-around services that people will need in their own homes to be able to sustain independent living. A significant number of the Housing Agency acquisitions that we spoke earlier are of the one-bedroom unit variety that will provide ideal accommodation solutions for some Housing First tenants but we also need to get the wrap-around services in place to ensure that they can sustain independent living.

Deputy Ellis mentioned that we had talked at the launch of the High Park model units. That model represents a much improved, better-quality solution for a short-term period and it is significantly better than hotel accommodation in terms of the range of facilities - including cooking and laundry facilities, homework clubs and practical supports for identifying the long-term housing solution that families will need - available to families. We want to replicate that model as part of our solution to dealing with the hotel accommodation issue The Deputy is right in saying that it is an ambitious target to achieve by the middle of the year but we are engaging - Ms Mary Hurley and Ms Bairbre Nic Aongusa in particular are doing so - with the Dublin local authorities on a weekly, and sometimes more frequent, basis as part of the process to ensure that every possible effort that needs to be made to achieve that target is made. It will be a case of us all putting our shoulders to the wheel on that one in the next few months.

Deputy Ellis and Senator Murnane O'Connor raised the issue of the mortgage to rent scheme. We carried out a review of it and published the outcome in February. Up to the end of last year, 217 mortgage-to-rent cases were completed and there were more than 600 other cases in progress. We heard some of the same commentaries the members have heard about the scheme, namely, that the process involved takes a long time and that it is cumbersome. We have itemised a number of actions in the review we published in February to try to improve the level of take-up in respect of the scheme. Some of those actions relate to the process involved - to try to make it faster - and some are around access to it. For example, we have increased the value of property that can be accepted into the scheme. We have also increased the thresholds for different houses and apartments in various parts of the country. We increased what can be accepted as spare capacity within a house. Under the new arrangements we have put in place, a house can be over-accommodated, so to speak, by two bedrooms. The owners of houses can have two spare bedrooms and they will still be able to qualify for the scheme. There is a programme of actions listed at the back of the review that are to be completed over the course of this year and that are set out to be done quarter by quarter. We are pretty much on track with most of those.

Some of the changes I have outlined came into force in recent days. Since the publication of the review, there has been a good, active programme with the AHBs. The latter take ownership of the properties to try to smooth out the conveyancing process and there a number of workshops have been held with other parties to try to ensure that we can massively reduce the time the process involved takes and to open up the scheme to a wider cohort of people. We will keep the scheme under review over the next few quarters and we hope there will be an increased level of activity under it, a return for the effort that is being put into it and, ultimately, that it will deliver housing solutions for the people who need them.