Mr. David Hall:

-----participating in mortgage-to-rent. They are writing off the debt. They are fully engaged and willing to sell the houses and do deals on the houses to do it. To come back to the Senator's point, if people are eligible to restructure their loan with the bank, they will offer them the chance to restructure. If a borrower cannot restructure his or her loan and cannot pay open-market value, which is a personal insolvency arrangement level, the next test is whether the loan can be sold to a charity. This would have the same price a vulture fund would take it on for. If the answer to that question is "No", the borrower is in trouble. That is the position of the 12,000. These are people who have lost jobs and are too old. Age and health are not on their side.

Those properties could be taken over as a form of National Asset Management Agency, NAMA, leaving the people housed, and the loans worked through one by one. Miraculously, this happened for the developers. They all stayed in their houses and they actually got a job out of it. This is not brain surgery. This is humane.

There are posters outside here that say "Compassion". Some of those posters would need to fall on some people's heads for them to understand. This is about the individual circumstances of people who have been tortured for years. This is not simply mathematics and buildings. Mortgage-to-rent has and will continue to save and change lives, and protect dignity. Dignity is a massive word here. It means those families do not have to go through a repossession court, where the local authority, the bank and ourselves verify they have no income. They have nothing to pay. All we are doing is torturing them unnecessarily.