Mr. Alan Flynn:

In relation to the specifics of the schemes, whether in the Department of Health for fair deal or the local authority rent a room to a student scheme, the real policy experts are the officials in those Departments. However, we have engaged with them as part of this. You mentioned that there were a number of potential barriers to undertaking the rental, say, of a fair deal property, about people emptying their parents' house or whatever it was. The Department cannot deal with all of those barriers but we can deal with one. If the person had been a social assistance scheme recipient, trying to rent the house was going to put at risk their social assistance scheme payment. By bringing in the disregard, we knocked that risk, which is the one within our ambit of control, off the list of risks.