Mr. Mike Allen:

On top-ups, during research a year or so ago on the experience of people on rent supplement we found that a huge number of them were paying top-ups. We also did another piece of research towards the end of last year which focused on families that had become homeless in Dublin, the vast majority of whom had previously lived in private rented accommodation, in respect of which they had been paying large top-ups which they later could not afford and got into debt with their landlords and ultimately lost their homes.

When one raises this issue with the Department of Social Protection the response is that there is no evidence of this. When we then ask if we sent to the Department a person who was engaged in paying top-ups and could prove this was happening the response is that they should move out of where they are living because that is against the rules. One cannot present evidence of this because the Department of Social Protection will penalise the whistleblower. In my view it is the only area of social welfare fraud in which the State is complicit in that it is the poor defrauding the poor. That is a very controversial thing to say but people seem to be perfectly happy with the poor defrauding themselves and no resources are applied to put this right. This leads to the issue of rent control. Greater regulation in the area of the receipt of and control of rents would help to control the issue of top-ups. Obviously, in introducing rent control one would have to ensure that making property available on the market remains attractive to landlords.

That should be a given. It is not simple to design such a system, but every other country in Europe, other than Britain, has managed it and there are many lessons we can learn from it. The State has a policy of increasing the number of people who live in private rented accommodation but it has done insufficient work on putting policies in place to ensure that people can also have a home in the private rented sector as well as just an apartment.