Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank all the guests, particularly for their day-to-way work, but then to have the bandwidth to be able to consider a policy review of an overall instrument that is really important in the work they do is really useful. I also acknowledge how difficult it is to balance those two things.

There is a commitment in the programme for Government to reduce the reliance on HAP but, equally, we have a commitment to ensure that HAP and rent supplement levels are at an adequate level to support housing needs. That is the crux of the issue. We want to continue to use this source of housing as a way of providing much-needed housing to people. We know, however, that changes need to be made. The statistic of 75% of people being happy with HAP in many ways shows how dysfunctional the current system is in that people are happy in tenancies that are subsidised by the State to a massive extent and which last only 12 months. That says a lot about where we are. Equally, however, we have spent, according to the figure I have, €422 million as of December 2019. There is €422 million being spent on 50,000 tenancies, involving more than 30,000 landlords, and instead of having a crack team of public procurement experts ensuring we have value for money, we have 50,000 of the most vulnerable people in the State negotiating that spend with individual landlords. All the social elements aside, and I do not wish to undermine any of the contributions made so far, the public procurement issues with this alone and the value for money for the State are an indictment. Some of this has been because rent supplement was the absence of a policy, but the failure to embed the rental accommodation scheme, as opposed to the housing assistance payment, in 2014 was a real failure to provide security of tenure, which I think the RAS provides. It also embeds the local authority as a procurer of the service rather than a bystander.

In the time the witnesses have available, could they talk about any experience they have had with the rental accommodation scheme and the way in which different local authorities manage security of tenure? I know that in Dublin city a RAS exit list comes on top of any other allocation, and that provides good security in general if not to the specific home. Furthermore, do the witnesses have ideas as to how the State might move towards using its dominance in the market? I think one third of all tenancies are supported. We are doing the exact opposite. We are not taking any benefit. Could that dominance in the market and our size in procuring from landlords be a better way of managing value for money rather than an arbitrary cap?