Pat Rabbitte (Dublin South West, Labour)

Perhaps the Taoiseach will set out the Government response to the report by the Comptroller and Auditor General on housing rent supplement. He will know that the cost to the taxpayer of housing rent supplement went from €151 million in 2000 to €369 million this year. Whereas that is very bad value for the taxpayer, it is far more serious for the 60,000 people on rent supplement who cannot enter full-time work. This is a pot of gold for the landlords. In very many cases, it provides a bounty worth tens of millions to those already the beneficiaries of tax breaks to build the apartments that they now rent out. Once one is on housing rent supplement, one cannot enter the workforce, and that is surely the biggest poverty limbo created by this scheme. The Minister has made reforming comments at his usual Sunday afternoon press conferences, with some of which I agree. However, I have not yet seen the detail of any of those reforms.

The crisis is created by the absence of public authority housing. The Government has contrived to transfer its social housing needs to the private rented sector for the same reason. Taking public authority and voluntary social housing, approximately 6,500 units are being realised per year. That goes nowhere near meeting existing need. The cloud hanging over negotiations for a new social contract reminds one of the commitment made over three years ago to produce 10,000 affordable houses under Sustaining Progress, the social contract now expiring. That has not happened, and the reason that so many young women find themselves in such conditions is that they cannot afford a mortgage or get a public authority house.

My colleague, Deputy Gilmore, has been hammering away at this issue for years. On a recent Adjournment debate, he raised the issue of a young woman with three children who was paying rent of €1,200 per month. When she got married to someone earning €505 in a low-paid job, they immediately lost the €300 per week rent supplement, leaving them with €205 to live on, worse off than before their marriage.

The system is not working, but instead producing a social and poverty limbo. The Comptroller and Auditor General now bears out the arguments that have been made by Deputy Gilmore in this House for some time. I would like to hear the Taoiseach's response.

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