Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 10 July 2019

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government

Housing for People with a Disability: Discussion (Resumed)

Mr. Aidan O'Reilly:

It could be patchy or there could be differing degrees of success or otherwise. Again, we addressed this issue in the workshops we held with the 31 local authorities. We will make this issue an important area of response in the performance improvements this year.

Deputy Gino Kenny asked about the maximum housing adaptation grant for people with a disability. The maximum available is €30,000. In the feedback from the local authorities we found that across all of the schemes, €8,000 is also available for older people and mobility grants of €6,000 are available. Feedback indicated that people are struggling with those limits in some cases. The average grant is often low but this does not mean that cases do not arise where people need significantly more than the current maximum cap. We will consider these caps as part of the review this year. We have to do so in the context of our objective to provide 11,000 grants with €71 million of funding. If we increased the maximum threshold across some or all of the schemes, we might not be able to provide as many grants, even with an increase in funding. Since 2014, funding has increased annually. We need to do the calculations and find where we would be left in terms of spread and the number of grants we could deliver if we were to increase the grants by a certain amount.