Thomas Gould (Cork North-Central, Sinn Fein)

I have two minutes left. I did not ask the Minister that question. I asked him for the overall figure and he has given me the overall figure so far. Since he brought up Cork City Council, the council has done agreements with landlords and tenants to purchase their homes under the tenant in situ scheme. These are homes that should have been bought last January, February or March. We are going into December next week. We spoke to some of those tenants last week and those purchases have not been done yet. My worry is we will have a repeat of what went on earlier this year where local authorities used up all their allocation, so they will go into next year’s money and then there will be a cut-off next year, such as we had last year, on 4 April, when the tenant in situ scheme was shut down in Cork because of a lack of funding. We were talking about homeless figures here. The tenant in situ scheme is a proven way to prevent people becoming homeless. More resources should be put into the tenant in situ scheme.

The Minister also made the point about local authorities doing work to homes. It is frightening to me. Local authorities are bringing homes up to energy efficiency levels when they are buying them. They are putting in new windows and doors, insulating the houses or putting new heating systems in. We have climate targets we need to hit. Local authorities are trying to do that work when they buy homes that do not meet energy efficiency levels. The Government is stopping that funding. It is telling them to do the bare minimum and get people in. Down the road, we are going to be fined.

This reminds me of a discussion I had last night with the Tánaiste on the budget. During austerity we slashed local authority funding for housing maintenance, parks, playgrounds and footpath repairs. The Minister touched on this a while ago. Now we are paying the price because we see loads of work that should have been done but has not been done. I will give one example which the Minister raised. He spoke about preventative maintenance. There has been virtually no preventative maintenance done in any local authority since the financial crash, the reason being that governments have not provided the funding.

The Minister said that local authorities should be providing planned maintenance programmes. With what? If it is not in the budget or the Supplementary Estimates, where will they get the funding? The Minister compared some local authorities with others. What he fails to understand is that some local authorities are retrofitting houses that are 100 years old. I come from Gurranabraher. It was built by the local authority in Cork 85 years ago. Imagine the cost of retrofitting one of those houses to bring it up to standard if the same family have lived in it for 85 years. Compare that with a different local authority repairing a house that might be only ten years old. The Minister is not taking any of that into consideration. I ask him to take it into consideration when he is dealing with local authorities and providing funding and, if not, why not?