Regina Doherty (Meath East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I agree that this set-up is weird, but life is a bit weird at the moment. I would be grateful if this were the least of our worries. I am not in negotiations with the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government over rent supplement and HAP because we were asked to respond to need. We took a 28-page application form, which requires large volumes of information, and revised it to a four-page form. We also changed the means test and some of the conditionality to reflect the new, hopefully temporary, world we are living in at the moment. Some 7,000 more people have been receiving rent supplement in the last eight weeks than would have beforehand. I expect that will probably continue to increase in the new order of things.

That is why we have a reflection of the increased value today in the rent supplement line which would not have been seen in December.

The reality is that people are going to need help paying their rent. As Deputy Ó Cuív mentioned earlier, the reality is that some families might need the reintroduction of what was the mortgage interest relief scheme. Whilst that was abolished and wound down over the past number of years, we are still giving people who would have availed of that scheme supplementary welfare and that is always an angle we can use.

The Deputy also asked about time processing. We are doing our level best and in the beginning, for the first number of weeks, we obviously had to redeploy people, regardless of what they were doing, onto the front line to look after pandemic unemployment payment applications so that we could get people into payment. People are now gradually going back to their own roles and what they were doing previously. I remind people that we have some 2,000 staff working remotely from home because that is the way the Civil Service has been asked to do things. It is only essential work that is being done in the office and no one should be going to the office if they do not have to. We are impacted by exactly the same things as many other businesses. Many of our workers do not have people to look after their children so they are grappling with that. Those who have underlying conditions are having to self-isolate. We are going through the same difficulties and challenges as every other worker and business that is working today.

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