Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank Professor Norris and Dr. Hayden for attending and for producing the report. The report is an important piece of research and that is one of the reasons we invited them here. It was regrettable, through no fault of the authors, that some of the media coverage at the time of report's launch did not give a true sense of the recommendations or the depth of the report. I hope we can overcome some of that. I ask them to give a little more detail to the committee on a number of issues.

One of the important aspect is their attempt to grapple with the core issue of how we finance local authority houses on an ongoing basis. Will they elaborate on how that will work? I refer to both the full cost of response maintenance and cyclic maintenance, etc. One of the concerns some of us have, if we accept the principle that the local authority should get the full cost recovery on a month-to-month basis, is the impact that has on the rents tenants pay. Rather than having the HAP model, where a tenant gets hit with a substantial rent bill and then he or she applies for the payment to subsidise it, would it make more sense to continue with differential rent, or a version of it, with the local authority getting an availability agreement payment from the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government centrally, as approved housing bodies currently do? That cuts out the unnecessary administration of a HAP-type payment system. It would mean the local authority would get cost recovery without having to necessarily jack up the rents significantly for low-income tenants. Would that achieve the same objective as the witnesses are suggesting?

I have questions on two other issues not dealt with in the report but I am sure they came up in conversations. They will also be pertinent to our later discussion. We are not just interested as a committee in how the units are properly maintained once they are built and ensuring that local authorities have adequate finance; we are also interested in how we get the units up and running in the first place. There has been much public discussion recently, and we have dealt with it in committee previously, about what happens after planning permission is granted through Part VIIIs and before construction starts - that 18 to 24-month process, if lucky, involving approval from the Department and tending and procurement. Will Professor Norris and Dr. Hayden give us their thoughts on that too? How can that be made more efficient to try to speed up the delivery of social housing? I am interested to hear the thoughts of the witnesses that might have arisen from their research and their own expertise.