Ms Ber Grogan:

The rent supplement and HAP, the housing assistance payment, are not in line with market rents. The rents keep growing consistently and because they are currently at such an unaffordable place, even with HAP people are paying top-ups themselves and going hungry. We also saw the Barnardos report yesterday as well. I have not actually heard of what the Deputy described. However, you can imagine being a community welfare officer and this is what you are trying to come up with.

We welcomed the changes around the security of tenure the Minister for housing was bringing in but we are still very concerned about affordability. If landlords will be able to reset market rents every time there is a rent review, we do not see an end to that. It is not ideal but to bring some sort of stability would mean having the market rent levels available to people who need the assistance.

Our "Locked out of the Market" report will come out next week. Ms Corey works on that. It is a quarterly report that shows how many properties are available and the affordability. It has got worse since the quarter 1 report. There are fewer and fewer affordable properties available.