Noel Ahern (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail)

We hope to initiate a pilot tenant purchase scheme to see how it will operate. I can well understand why the voluntary housing body would still want to control an estate and be responsible for the green areas therein. I see merit in this because its input and commitment might decrease if it were only looking after half the estate. I am sure it would be possible to have some sort of scheme or co-operative — I do not want to use the phrase "management company" — whereby the house owner would still pay a certain amount for estate management or landscaping.

There has been a reduction of 9.8% in the number on waiting lists for housing. Many people are on more than one local authority housing list, particularly in Dublin where there are four local authorities. Perhaps we encourage this and I probably do so myself at clinics. Louth and Meath county council areas are just out the road and, depending on where one's constituent lives, one might encourage him or her to include himself or herself on a couple of lists. When we carry out the overall national assessment, we account for this duplication by co-ordinating all the information so that the final figure amounts to less than the sum of the parts.

The aforesaid phenomenon might feature more in Dublin than in the middle of certain other counties. In the greater Dublin area, people are inclined to back all horses and include themselves on the lists of Fingal County Council, Dublin City Council and South Dublin County Council. When we compile all the figures, we often discover the true size of the waiting list is much smaller than expected. Co-ordination in the compilation of the data has improved. During the last assessment, we used PPS numbers and this helped to tidy up the figures. That was not the only reason for the reduction in the numbers, but it helped. People who were renting privately and were moving from one rent allowance to another used to sit on local authority lists under a couple of different addresses.

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