Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)
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For this year, it will depend on progress and how successful it is. I suspect there is more money allocated than is being drawn down. I will get an exact figure for the Deputy but it will be more accurate at the end of the year.

All of these figures need to come with a health warning to a certain extent. We are planning to launch an action plan for housing in two weeks’ time, which may impact on what we can and cannot do for the remainder of the year. There also might be a need to spend more money in certain areas and to make a case for that. This is the most accurate Estimate we can publish at this point.

Up to 63% of the HAP tenancies are new tenancies. Some people dismiss the HAP as double counting, claiming it really is people on rent supplement switching over to the HAP. Actually, two thirds of the people on the HAP are new social housing solutions. The appetite to take up the HAP is gaining momentum. People were fearful of it at the start because they felt, once on it, they were not on the housing list per sebut the housing transfer list. These suspicions are being addressed in many areas. We are hoping to get an extra 10,000 people on to the payment this year. Hopefully, we will be able to accelerate that next year. Nineteen local authorities have made the HAP available. The big jump will be to take on the Dublin local authorities. At the moment, they only have it for homelessness. In 2017, we hope it will be rolled out to every local authority. People switching over from rent supplement to the HAP will obviously see a dramatic transfer of funding from the Department of Social Protection to our Department.

It is interesting that we had a mix of compliments and criticisms for the decision to increase rent supplements and the HAP, as one would expect. This proves it is not a straightforward issue in terms of the impact it might have on rents broadly. Certainly, it was the right decision. This is about keeping people in their homes in the context of more people being priced out of the rental market. Next year, it will cost €55 million in total, €12 million of which will be for the HAP. For the remainder of this year, it will be a much smaller figure because it is only a half year figure.

Top-ups, or under-the-counter payments as some people call them, are happening around rent supplement. They should not happen but we need to be honest and practical about that. For people to stay in their homes, they get money from different sources, sometimes from other family members, to top-up their rent, which is already being supported through rent supplement. That is not what is supposed to be happening with the scheme. However, it has been a practical response by some people to deal with landlords who are behaving in a way they should not be. What we are trying to encourage is for people to come forward and be upfront as to what they have been paying under the counter. At least then, we would understand, from a revenue perspective, what landlords are actually being paid. Accordingly, we then can end the under-the-counter payment element of that.

The HAP is slightly different because it is not illegal to do that but neither do we encourage it. We did not pick the increases out of thin air. The numbers are based on the figures we have been given regarding the 35th percentile - in other words, the bottom third of prices in the rental market. What we are trying to do, and what we have done through the Residential Tenancies Board, is to get an accurate picture of what people are being asked to pay in the market at the moment. That is the figure that we have increased the support to meet. The big challenge is simply the numbers in terms of supply. Even if one is in theory being offered sufficient supports to be able to get access to market rents linked to the 35th percentile calculation, whether the actual properties are available is certainly a fair point. That is why all these pressures will only be alleviated when we have a dramatic increase in supply both in the private rental sector and in social housing.

Deputy Mattie McGrath has left the room but he pointed to the fact that our construction industry has not been functioning at any kind of normal level for a decade now, whether in Tipperary or Dublin or anywhere else for that matter. Our job is to try to manage that in order that we get a sustainable but also quite dramatic injection of activity to get movement going to try to deal with the supply deficit, which is causing many other problems that we are left to deal with through social housing, emergency accommodation, homelessness services and so on.

I think I have answered most of the questions.