Martin Conway (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister and, like Senator Boyhan, congratulate him on his words in the Dáil on Wednesday night. He brought a lot of clarity to people's minds on where we are with this crisis, what has been done, where we are on the road to fixing it and what the plans are to deal with it. People are more interested discovering what is happening. I have often said that houses take time to build. We do not have enough of them but they are being built. Some 4,500 were built in the last quarter, which speaks volumes.

I have a few issues I wish to raise with the Minister. Does he have any plans for a tenant purchase scheme? I am not convinced that such a scheme is necessarily the right way to go but it has been flagged. What is the current position regarding such a scheme?

On HAP and the cap relating to social housing, I agree with what others have said on this. In County Clare, it is €25,000 for a single person and €30,000 for a couple. That needs to be increased significantly. There are people who are falling beneath the threshold due to very small figures. We need some flexibility. In the first instance, the cap needs to be increased to a realistic level, especially considering the way rents are going. We also need flexibility so that individual cases and circumstances can be taken into consideration, particularly where there are children with illnesses involved. Flexibility at local authority level needs to be looked at and I do not know if there have been any moves to do that or if there are any plans to do so moving forward.

On Traveller-specific accommodation, I have a sense that local authorities are not making cases to the Department to purchase houses for large Traveller families. There is a housing crisis within the Traveller community and it requires special attention. There are families with six, eight and ten children in Traveller communities in local authority areas who are on the housing lists and need to be accommodated. Again, flexibility is needed on the part of local authorities and the Department in the context of how the former can apply to the latter for funding to purchase houses for members of the Traveller community. A much more focused approach is needed to deal with that.

I agree with vacant home taxes. We need to adopt the stick more than the carrot in our approach. The scheme to fix up and rent out properties is good but there are many properties out there where if there was a vacant property tax, the minds of the owners would be focused. It should be looked at in the upcoming budget. We also need to look at a levy for holiday homes and properties that are never rented out. If an individual can afford to have a holiday home then he or she should be in a position to pay a special levy on that property which could then be channelled into the pot for helping to deal with the crisis that exists. There are thousands of them out there. I have spoken to the Minister for Finance, Deputy Donohoe, about this in the context of something to which consideration should be given. Not too many people advocate for more taxes but, in this particular case, the possibility should be examined.

On the turnaround time between local authorities and the Department, the objective is for 59 weeks from the inception of the discussions on a scheme of houses to getting said scheme shovel-ready. In order to achieve that target, there has to be better synergy between local authorities and the Department. There are too many instances of one side referring back to the other for more information and when schemes are sent up by the project teams and the various local authorities they are being filleted. There should be some sort of standardised specification because local authorities are finding it very difficult to meet the 59-week target timeframe because of the amount of intricacies coming from the Department. That is what I am being told by those at local authority level in any event.