Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail)
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I very much welcome that.

While the Comptroller and Auditor General would not describe it as non-compliant procurement, it looks like a crazy way of procuring that volume of units. Given that the State has very large capital reserves and the ability to purchase homes which we know we are going to rent out for at least three years and well beyond that, I do not understand why we are not making the decision to do so. Young couples renting in the market at the moment say to each other that they would be better off getting a mortgage and buying the property they are renting rather than paying the rents they are paying currently and yet the Department is not saying that, even though it is paying rents at a massive scale. I hope our guests take the point I am making. I ask them to continue to look at HAP and RAS and examine ways to use our huge capital reserves to reduce our current Government expenditure without having a massive inflationary impact. The moral hazard of the waiting list does not apply because we have already broken that principle with the tenantin situscheme. These are already people's homes. We could procure these homes in the morning and those people would have secure tenancies for the rest of their lives. We would relieve their anguish and save the State money. That seems like a no-brainer.

I want to come back to the issue of local government funding. In the short time remaining I want to talk about the black box - I will not call it a black hole - that is local government funding. I was a member of a local authority for a long time and passed many budgets. I was part of the budget consultative group but it was incredibly difficult for us, as councillors, to quantify the total amount of income we were receiving from Government through various funds. Has the Department examined how we might simplify that? I am sure other committee members will also discuss this issue but part of the problem with assessing local government income is the lack of transparency. There is confusion around the interactivity between the local government fund, changing grants, the baseline funding model and so on. Does Mr. Doyle accept that there is a lack of transparency in that area?