Ms Deirdre Mason:

We are trying to harness the private rental market to provide for the need of people waiting for a local authority or AHB house. We have seen in HAP since its inception a large number of transfers into other forms of social housing.

The vast majority of those transfers would be into units owned by local authorities and approved housing bodies. There are over 9,000 tenancies in that category at this point. The value for money aspect is that there are over 60,000 active tenancies in HAP at the moment. While this is a large amount of Exchequer expenditure, it is providing for a huge number of households to be accommodated. There are two points I would make about the average cost. The average cost in terms of the landlord payments is about €10,000. The Exchequer element of that is only about €8,000. A report done by the Central Statistics Office, CSO, in 2019 looked at the impact of HAP tenancies in an area. The effects on rental levels have been mentioned. It found that there is no clear correlation between the number of HAP tenancies in an area and increases in rent. That was a very interesting finding. It is one of the reasons that the Minister would say that we keep HAP limits under review. We are conscious of any inflationary effects of increasing the limits. The other point is that the limits are a separate discretion that local authorities have: 20% across the country and 50% for homeless households in Dublin. Limits are set, which mitigates some of the risk in terms of inflated prices-----