Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)
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On a point of information, as I said, there is a very large number of local authority houses and former local authority houses in my constituency. Unless something extraordinary was done, such as the conversion of a small local authority house into some kind of mansion, I would not be aware of any case in which the quality of work done by a tenant to a house would be taken into account in assessing a differential rent. The imposition on local authorities to assess that would be very difficult. In my experience, differential rents are calculated on incomes and the number of people in the house rather than on work the tenants may have done to improve the quality of the house. As far as almost every local authority is concerned, the more tenants do up their houses, the better for the whole estate, the quality of life for everybody on the estate and the desirability of the estate.