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

I would like to thank the officials from the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government and the Housing Agency for the substantial volume of material we got yesterday. I appreciate it takes a significant amount of work. This is not a criticism of the officials, whom I know are overburdened with work, but I want to express frustration that we get the information very late. It makes it more difficult for us to properly scrutinise the material if we get it late. Please do not take this as a criticism, because I know producing detailed reports takes a lot of time, but even if we could get this material a day in advance, it would make our jobs much easier.

As the Minister is aware, this committee unanimously agreed a report on family homelessness which we published in November and which had 14 very specific recommendations. I would be interested to know, not only if the Minister has considered the report, but if at this stage he could commit to saying that he would support any of those. If the Minister is not in a position to give us that information now, could he let us know if it is his intention to correspond with the committee to tell us his view on each of those 14 recommendations. It was a piece of work that took the committee and the clerk a considerable amount of time, and I think there are some very good suggestions in there which I hope the Minister would lift from it.

One of the issues I am increasingly concerned about is the smaller number of families who are expending considerably longer periods of time in emergency accommodation. By and large, they are families with larger numbers of children. They could be Traveller or Roma families or just families which have larger than average numbers of children. We have a small number of families that will spend their fourth Christmas in emergency accommodation, and for some, it will be their third Christmas. Can the Minister tell us how many families are more than two, three, and four years in emergency accommodation? More importantly, is it not now time for some specific intervention, tailored to the family size, to try to get these families out of emergency accommodation, particularly given the difficulty that many local authorities have in both acquiring and producing sizeable four bedroom units?

The summary of social housing assessment is a very important report.

I welcome its publication by the Housing Agency every year. It shows a year-on-year change of 3,000 households, that is, a decline of the number of families on the list of 3,000. What the report does not say as far as I can see, which it did say last year, is how many new households came onto the lists during the 12 months. I think it is fair to say that if the overall social housing support delivery, including real social housing and subsidised private rental tenancies, is in the order of 17,000 to 19,000 in that year, and there is only a reduction of 3,000 households, we may be seeing a significant increase in the level of new social housing demand on previous years. The reports of last year and the year before recorded approximately 14,000 new households on the list. The figure for this year is not there but it seems to me that we could be looking at something much more significant. I would appreciate if the Minister could give us any response to that.

I want to talk about the social housing output figures. My interest in them is not because I want to run out of here and misrepresent the Minister. I do think this committee has a legitimate right to track the targets and ask questions, particularly as to whether those targets will be met. In my commentary on this matter this morning on the radio, I made it very clear that we questioned this at this time last year when the Minister said he would deliver on his targets, and he did deliver on them. My one concern is that while the Department is ahead on acquisitions, similarly to this time last year it is behind on new builds and leases. It is in a similar position in terms of how behind it is on the new builds. The delivery rate is about 35% at the end of quarter 3, which is exactly the same as last year. The Minister is absolutely correct that by the end of quarter 4 last year the targets had been filled out. However, this year, the target is greater by 2,000 new builds than it was last year. The Minister has more visibility on this than we do. How confident is he that he is going to meet those targets by the end of the year? It is an important question and I would like to think that some of the pressure on the Minister and his officials does come from the work of this committee highlighting it.

I also think it is legitimate for us to ask questions breaking down the different aspects of the new build programme. I welcome any real social housing, no matter what delivery stream it comes through, including approved housing bodies, AHBs, turnkey, local authority new builds and acquisitions. However, it is concerning that despite the fact that we have some 31 local authorities, their portion of the new build still seems to be sluggish. It is more than it was in previous years but, for example, there are only about five large approved housing bodies delivering the vast bulk of AHB stock. I warmly welcome that stock. The reason many of us ask about the new build figure is that it should be significantly ahead of all the others, yet three and a half years into this plan it is still very sluggish. I am genuinely interested to know, within the local authority and AHB new builds, the number or percentage of turnkeys. I am not against turnkeys. I have a number of very significant turnkeys in my own constituency that are really valuable. None of those is the kind of turnkey the Minister described. They were all either near completion or on site when they were sold. I am not objecting to them. However, if local authorities are becoming over-reliant on turnkeys, that says something about their own output. I am genuinely interested in teasing that out a little bit more.

I also want to talk about HAP and RAS. I have never argued that there should not be a rental subsidy. My concern is that the targets in Rebuilding Ireland have far too much rental subsidy and far too little real social housing. Over the period of Rebuilding Ireland, the percentage of rent supplement transfers as the overall HAP figure is about 23%. This year so far it is about 13%. The vast bulk of those are people who have not actually moved property. They have stayed in the one property but have moved from one rental subsidy to the other. Surely we should not be including them in what is presented to us as new tenancies. I am not trying to get into a row about playing the figures here but when the Department gives us the output figures at the end of the year, the impression is that these are all new things. If I am living in the same property and have just moved from rent supplement to HAP as the HAP scheme has advantages that rent supplement does not, it should not be suggested that this is something new in terms of the tenancy. I am also concerned about the impact of the growing levels of HAP tenancies on the rental market more generally. If we have had 66,935 HAP tenancies created since Rebuilding Ireland, that is a lot of rental stock taken out of standard rental. Has the Department done any assessment of the impact of such large levels of HAP on the rental market overall, rental prices, demand and so on? I am not arguing against rental subsidies. It is the disproportionate over-reliance on rental subsidies versus new stock.