Ms Niamh O'Donoghue:

In theory. Rent supplement, when it was put in place, was always designed to be a short-term payment. The problem with rent supplement, particularly in the last number of years, is that the numbers involved and the length of time they stayed on rent supplement went way beyond anybody's consideration. The difficulty from a rent supplement point of view was that rent supplement was only payable to somebody who was unemployed. If one was employed, one was not entitled to rent supplement. The design of the housing assistance payment, HAP, was to try to break that link and effectively make a supplement available to people who are employed. What has happened so far is that I think somewhere in the order of 12,000 or 13,000 people have moved to the housing assistance payment. We still have about 50,000 people on rent supplement. HAP will never replace rent supplement entirely. However, in servicing, we are very much in this transition period as HAP is beginning to move up and we are working with the local authorities in terms of identifying people and moving them across.