Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Many individuals and unfortunately some families with children have been affected by it. As the Deputy knows, before Christmas, in conjunction with all of the agencies and indeed with most of the political parties, the Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government, Deputy Alan Kelly, moved a series of special measures to deal with the situation which have been very favourably received - initiatives like the night café and the transport arrangements for people who are out on the street.

As regards the budget, the Deputy will remember from when he was in government that his party managed to destroy the building industry through a bubble and the core of the problem now is a build-up of a shortage of houses for different sizes of families and households. Slowly but surely, following what Fianna Fáil did to the building industry and the 330,000 people who lost their jobs as a result of what it did, we are now in a situation where the supply of housing is increasing.

The Deputy is wrong in his reference to rent supplement. If he had been here in the House when I spoke about this on a number of occasions, he would know that we have introduced a protocol in conjunction with organisations like Threshold, Simon and other bodies who are assisting people who have difficulty with housing. What we are doing now is what should have always been done. We are actually dealing with cases on a case-by-case basis because to simply raise and increase all rent levels, as Fianna Fáil seems to be implying, would be to drive up rent levels for people at work and for students enormously. What we are doing under the protocol is providing for negotiated increases for any individual or family in need of help in sustaining their rent supplement.

Since the beginning of this year we have negotiated 4,000 new rent supplement tenancies through the Department of Social Protection. What we have also done is deal at this point in time with a couple of hundred cases of people who came to the community welfare service. I invite people to go to the community welfare service to avail of the protocol so that a detailed arrangement can be put in place. In that respect, the community welfare service officers have total discretion in negotiating higher rents and an agreed rent if that is an appropriate solution for helping people to hold on to a tenancy.

With the Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government, Deputy Kelly, we are also looking at the issue of seeking to provide levels of rent certainty for tenants renting privately and through rent supplement. The Minister is looking at that at the moment.

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