Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The letter concludes with the director of organisation support and development conveying his apologies again for not having reverted last September. This is because we keep following it up. He states a further update will be provided once the board has a final decision from its insurers regarding the losses incurred. We will note this correspondence. We want a reply or update within three months. We will let the board know that we want an update by the end of April. We will move on and note that.

No. 1889 is from the Secretary General of Department of Defence and includes information requested by the committee on cases taken under the Organisation of Working Time Act 1997. I propose we send a copy of this to Senator Craughwell, who raised the matter with the committee. We will note and publish that and forward it to the Senator.

No. 1892 is from the Secretary General of the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government. We asked the Secretary General to deal with the fragmented nature of funding for local authorities from different Departments. His reply states that there is no cross-departmental review under way but the matter is being looked at in the broader review of the local property tax being led by the Department of Finance. He says that once that matter has been concluded and the outcome announced, arrangements will be made for details to be forwarded to the committee. We have raised the issue, which is tied in with the local property tax review. The outcome of that process will be made public in due course. That is all he is telling us.

The second item we requested related to inspections of properties under the housing assistance payment. The Secretary General is saying that the councils' information technology systems do not adequately record all the HAP inspections carried out. He explains that prior to HAP being introduced, some local authorities had separate inspection databases that logged inspection related activity. That would have been for private rented properties. As a result, local authorities need to disaggregate inspection information relating to HAP properties from their broader inspection databases to enable a single national report to be extracted. The Department is telling us that it does not have a database on HAP inspections. The letter goes on to say that the Department is following up the matter with a number of local authorities and will provide the committee with a report in the coming weeks. We note that we will get a report in March. It is a shambles.