Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

As stated in the programme for Government, in the Government's commitments and as I have stated in the House, the aim and objective is to transfer rent supplement to the local authorities which are expert on housing and have housing departments. The difficulty in regard to community welfare officers or the community welfare service, as it is now known in the Department, is that the community welfare service officer is dealing with the individual, not the landlord, whereas the local authority has the power and the capacity to deal with both the individual on a housing list and the landlord who is providing accommodation. There is an interdepartmental working group between my Department and the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government, addressing the various complex issues involved. I hope for something like the RAS scheme, whereby the local authorities rent the property for a number of years and the individual is much freer to work. The problem with rent supplement is that there is an inherent employment or poverty trap involved.

I refer to the issue of negotiations with landlords. We have data we collected from around the country on an exhaustive basis, from all the different available sources. They indicated clearly that in some cases the Department of Social Protection, which is responsible for approximately 40% of rented properties in the country, was paying over the odds for rented accommodation. My situation is that, along with every Minister, I am required to find savings and get value for money. When one looks at availability of accommodation in various parts of the country and considers the kinds of falls in property values - this does not apply everywhere, obviously - it is surprising that rents have not reflected such falls to some degree. It is important that the Department gets value for money.

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