Mr. Mike Allen:

I will respond to the question as to why discretionary uplifts will not work. They can work to a certain extent if there has been a small misalignment or there are particular needs to be addressed. Discretionary measures have always been part of the rent supplement and supplementary welfare allowance, SWA, systems. While the Threshold initiative is very welcome, it is actually putting into effect something which has always been in the SWA system. Discretionary measures will not work, however, in the face of the scale of the current problem. The principle of all social policy dealing with people who are poor or vulnerable is to find them, target them and give them support, while not giving support to people who do not need it. Would that not be wonderful, but how do we find those people? The very people who are the most vulnerable for various reasons including language issues, stress, literacy problems and so forth are the ones who do not hear about the system and about the existence of discretionary payments. They are the most vulnerable but they do not benefit from the discretionary interventions. That is why there is a constant debate in social policy circles about universal versus targeted measures and if we cannot find the people to target, we are going to have to employ more universal measures. That is our position on the rent supplement.

It is also worth saying, in the context of Ashley's point about the scale of the problem in the private rented sector, that there are very few people who would not accept that it was a catastrophic error to have so many people who were vulnerable to poverty housed in the private rental sector, with the taxpayer footing the bill if rents increased. I do not know anyone who would defend that or claim that it was not a mistake. The question now is who pays for that mistake. While we are talking about an enormous amount of money being given to private landlords to pay for it, the alternative is to make the people living in the private-rental houses pay for it. Nobody can say that it is good social policy to give lots of money to landlords, it does not make any sense. However, we are not starting from that point.

We are starting from the fact that we have had 50,000, 60,000 or 70,000 households living with that level of vulnerability. We are considering how the Members of the Oireachtas, as the successors of the legislators who made those errors, can deal with the fact that so many people are now living with such risks. It might mean spending money in a way that would not have made much sense if we turned the clock back a number of years. We have given a great deal of money to much more undeserving people on foot of mistakes they have made in the past.

We were also asked about the delivery of social housing numbers. Certain assumptions were made about the speed with which the private developing market would pick up and start generating new housing estates, and consequently Part V properties, that would build into the plan as written. It transpired that those assumptions were not true. The question of whether that might have been foreseen is a different one. The new Minister has said a few things that give me some faith that he recognises the current position and believes that alternative things need to be done, rather than waiting for the private sector to generate social housing as a by-product. Time will tell whether that is the case.

We were also asked about single landlords. It is really the same issue about targeting people. It is right to say we did not want to get into a position where we were saying that one's right to terminate the lease when one wants to sell should be abolished. In such circumstances, we could be inundated with people with severe disabilities who need to sell their homes, or people who need to move back into their houses, who are caught by the new rules. I agree that there might be more nuanced ways of identifying who should or should not be allowed to sell a rented house, so that there is no blanket right to sell. A higher level of proof must be required and a longer period of time must be provided for. It is important to remember that the buy-to-let part of the Irish private rented sector is based on the notion that a house is a commodity which an investor can sell to get a return on his or her investment. It is not based on the notion that the owner of such a property is actually running a business, the business of which is to provide somebody else with a home. We cannot change that overnight, but we need to be moving in that direction very quickly.