John Curran (Dublin Mid West, Fianna Fail)
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Thank you. I have one or two quick comments to make. First, I acknowledge the Minister has increased these payments. They were set about three years ago and they were no longer effective. People here rightly said that it will not increase supply, but it gives people dependent on these payments an equal opportunity in the marketplace they were being squeezed out of. That was the reality.

On these payments and the increases, I specifically ask that they are kept under constant review and acted on when they are not in line with market needs. I am conscious of this because before I came here I was on the housing committee. Our recommendation was a little more subtle: that they be not just increased, but increased in line with market rents. We did not envisage that Dublin would be just two zones - either Fingal or not Fingal. That works both ways, at the higher and lower levels. When you publish these figures, they have a tendency to push rents up in some areas and in others, as you have heard from some of the Deputies, they do not meet them. As the payments are under constant review, our study areas should also be reviewed into smaller regions so they are more accurately reflected. That is the first issue you might comment on.

Second is the exceptional needs payment. I want to highlight an issue. We constantly think of people in HAP, on rent allowance or whatever, but there is a transition. There are people in private rented accommodation. In most cases, but not exclusively, through either job loss or marriage break-up - those are the two main reasons - a person ends up in a house that they had been paying the rent for from their resources, but they are now dependent on State support. There is a lead time. During that time inevitably debt builds up because they have to go to the local authority or the community welfare officer. They were paying from their own resources, but they might have lost their job, or whatever, and there is a debt. Are exceptional needs payments available to those people to clear that debt? In other words, they eventually get on to the HAP scheme, a rent allowance, whatever the scheme might be, but in the interim, from the time they lost their job, their partner left the house or whatever the issue was, a debt has accrued. Can exceptional needs be considered in those cases to clear that debt? Those are my two questions and there were comments from previous speakers.