Damien English (Meath West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

As I said, we will be bringing the social housing package forward in the very near future. After that, there will be discussions around this recommendation. I have discussed it with some of Deputy O'Brien's colleagues and we can discuss it further. We have had conversations about what people wanted from this. The sense we got was that people wanted a way of dealing with that €15,000 income barrier. I will clarify why it is there. It is not a madcap idea. There is a logic to it. The tenant purchase scheme has quite a long history of cases where people could not afford to maintain houses after purchasing them. In order to ensure the sustainability of the scheme, it is essential that an applicant's income is of a long-term and sustainable nature. This is necessary to ensure the tenant purchasing the house is in the financial position, as the owner, to maintain and ensure the property for the duration of the charge period, in compliance with the conditions of the order transferring ownership. A condition of the transfer of the ownership of the house is that for the duration of the incremental purchase charge, which goes on for 20 or 30 years, the tenant purchaser must keep the house in good repair and condition and maintain house insurance on the property. The tenant purchaser is also responsible for the normal changes associated with home ownership. Our research and the history of the scheme showed that this did not always happen without that income barrier. To be fair, the €15,000 minimum might not be the best way to address that because it prevents someone who has won the lottery or benefitted from a settlement of some sort from buying their house. We are trying to find ways to deal with that. That will also form part of the package.

An impression has probably been given that this is the reason people are not buying houses. In one sample year more than 2,400 applications were made under the scheme. Fewer than a quarter were refused because of the eligibility criteria. Those criteria did not affect the other 75%. I must be clear that this is not the main issue. It is an issue in some individual cases, but it is not the main reason people are not using this scheme.

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