Dr. Robert Sweeney:

That is absolutely true. The advantage of the housing assistance payment, HAP, and the other schemes was that it was very quick to set up whereas it takes time to scale up local authority building. It is not good value for money to rely on what are essentially transfers to private landlords. Reliance on these schemes is not an efficient use of public funds and it would be better to build new units, as analysis by the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform has shown. That was also shown by an analysis by the architect, Mel Reynolds. In 2017, he compared how much it costs to build social housing directly with relying on HAP. He calculated, based on 2017 figures, that the State monthly payments, when he took everything in, were approximately €400 greater under HAP than direct build. We are absolutely better off building new units than relying on the transfer system.