Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

I know the North Circular Road area very well. I am aware from the external appearance that issues potentially arise with much of the accommodation ones sees on the road. The solution is to transfer over a period responsibility for rent supplement so that in future it would be overseen by the local authority. As Deputy Donohoe is probably aware, in some cases people refuse offers of decent accommodation in good local authority houses in favour of private rented accommodation. That does not happen as much in Dublin but more so in some areas outside of Dublin.

We need to integrate housing provision schemes. The rental accommodation scheme, RAS, has great potential. After I became Minister I met local authority managers and the Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government, Deputy Hogan, and Deputy Penrose when he was Minister of State with responsibility for housing to see whether we could work in a co-ordinated way over a period to improve the situation described by Deputy Donohoe.

We must also ensure that all landlords are properly registered, that we have their PRSI numbers and that they pay tax. The Department of Social Protection is currently paying for half the private rented accommodation in the country, for more than 95,000 people, and the cost is well over €500 million. The cost to the taxpayer is very high. We will be able to find a better solution when we transfer more of the tenancies. At the moment the desire is that anyone who is on rent supplement for more than 18 months should go into a local authority, RAS-type situation. However, that is taking a great deal of time to achieve. One of the problems compounding the situation is that local authorities have approximately 88 separate schemes of differential rent, so when people move from one scheme to another the IT systems do not talk to each other. It is extremely difficult to deal with the issue but it is an area I hope to see progressed.

A working group from the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government and the Department of Social Protection meets regularly to try to see whether we can transfer more tenancies at a faster rate to local authorities, which will then have a much more direct interest in the quality of the accommodation. By and large, community welfare officers, who are now employees of my Department, and social welfare officers are not skilled in the area of inspecting property. It is not something they have done. This is a function that should be carried out by the housing departments of local authorities. They are the people with the skills.

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