Mr. Brian O'Gorman:

I recently met the Senator in Carlow when we opened a scheme. We share her concerns about the rent caps. A different differential rent rate applies in each local authority area. There is a real issue of equity. There should be one differential rent scheme for the entire country. Whether a tenant is in County Donegal or County Wexford, he or she should be charged the same rent, based on his or her income. That is the system we all want to have in place. Having a system with a rent payment that is fair and affordable would be preferable for everybody, but we see a significant disparity because ours are national organisations. However, it becomes much more immediate and pressing in the Senator's constituency where the counties of Laois and Carlow are literally across the river from each other. People know that their neighbours are making different rent payments, which is a real problem.

We acquire units on the open market. Most of us have programmes which include both acquisitions and developments. We acquire some properties and build and develop some. We do not see ourselves as competing with the private sector. In fact, we enable it to do more as we can make deals with private developers. Because developers have a guaranteed sale on a portion of a development they can fund the rest of it through the private sector. We see ourselves as facilitating the private as well as the social sector. The last thing we want to do is to encourage the idea that social housing is competing with private housing. We need more of all forms of housing.

It is fair to say classification has not had a huge effect, as Mr. Dunne and Dr. McManus pointed out in their submissions. That is because as a country we are doing a lot better than we were during the recession years. As such, the impact has not been felt. We are trying to prevent an impact in the future. We are trying to plan for a situation where there will be many more demands on Government finance and the same level of funding will not be available for housing. That is of what we need to take care at this stage. If money can be sourced outside the public sector, the Government will be enabled to do more with the funding it has available. I am just repeating what others said. We have done a lot of work in the 18 months since classification, but we cannot do it without the help of the Department of Finance and the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government. To come back to Deputy Ó Broin's point, the Department of Finance has stated it is the lead Department in dealing with this issue. It is a whole-of-government issue. While the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government can do a certain amount, the Department of Finance is the lead Department. Without its active involvement, we will not be able to do this. As Dr. McManus said, if we can collaborate, liaise and work with the Department, we can reverse the classification decision. In the North of Ireland and throughout Britain the regulator, the housing associations, or registered social landlords as they are called, and the Government have worked together to reverse the classification undertaken in 2015. They were taken off the balance sheet in 2017. We can do similar things but only in collaboration with the Departments.