Ms Helen Faughnan:

There were concerns about the two-year limit on rent increases and we have heard that a lot of landlords put up the rent before it took effect. The tenancy agreements are spread across the year and the landlord will declare a rent figure whenever a lease ends. There has been a small increase in the number of queries to the Department about this, but few people have presented. We will wait and see what happens. I advise people to contact Threshold because it is an advocacy service for tenants and may be able to help those who are negotiating with landlords in declaring top-ups. Dealing with Revenue is a matter for landlords, but the Department can improve communication and encourage clients who are in difficulty. We will also talk to NGOs operating in this space and have asked them to encourage clients to come to us, particularly around the time of review of their rent supplement claim which generally takes place once a year.

Under the HAP scheme, there will be €450 million available to support 100,000 households. The housing action plan will include a commitment to increase supply, but there is a dependency on the rental market. The advantage of the housing assistance payment over rent supplement is that payments will not be stopped to people who take up part-time or full-time work. Rent supplement is a short-term income support, but it will cease for a person in full-time employment. The housing assistance payment will allow people to increase their hours at work or take up full-time work and have their differential rent payment recalculated. We are already seeing some of the benefits of this. Some 160 households have moved from being fully unemployed to part-time work, while 130 have moved from unemployment into full-time work and 20 from part-time to full-time employment. The big difficulty with the rent supplement scheme was that local authorities were happy for us to look after these tenants and were not aware of the housing needs of so many.

It is time that this new housing assistance payment, HAP, came into play and that housing authorities considered the social housing needs of this full complement of people.

We will have to keep the deposits issue under review. We are coming more and more into this space under our exceptional needs payments and will be meeting the needs of people but not with outlandish payments. They will have to be within the normal market rules for rent deposits or rent in advance if that is required. Dublin City Council, which is operating the HAP homeless pilot for the four Dublin local authorities, is providing rent deposits and rent in advance to help secure people tenancies and particularly to move them out of hotel accommodation. It is doing this in addition to being able to go up to 50% above the limits in play to try to secure accommodation. That is working. We are working with our colleagues in the local authorities and will keep this matter under review.