Mr. Derek Rafferty:

I will reiterate Ms Ryan's earlier remarks about the better use of technology. The Deputy's point was well made. Ideally, we would like the application for social housing support to go online. That would be a progressive step. We are looking at it as part of the broader social reform agenda. Similarly, as part of the broader reform agenda, there is a case for having the application for social housing support, which is virtually the same in every local authority, dealt with by one authority rather than 31 different local authorities, as is currently the case. These are broader reform issues, and there are many other things below that to be implemented, but they are on our radar.

On the issue of using data to give us a better idea of the people who have been on the housing waiting lists for seven years or more, it is possible to do so. The process which we go through with the CCMA and local authorities to get the summary of social housing assessments, SSHA, each year is exhaustive but once the data have been cleaned up, they give us an incredibly detailed dataset that we can mine. We are planning to create sub-reports of the summary of social housing assessments that would look at specific issues. That will probably be done this year. Waiting lists would be one sub-report, while the situation of older people would be another. We would certainly be able to get the data to which the Deputy referred. We can probably interrogate and investigate the data to the nth degree. We will examine this issue in the context of the 2018 SSHA, which should be published by the third or fourth quarter of this year.