Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Because of the refusal of the Tánaiste’s Government, the previous Government he was part of and the previous Government before that to raise the income threshold for eligibility for social housing, the Economic and Social Research Institute, ESRI, recently pointed out that since 2011, when the Tánaiste entered Government, the number of households eligible for social housing support has dropped from 46% to 33%. To put it another way, had the Government maintained the threshold at the previous level, 260,000 additional families would be eligible for social housing and, critically, for housing assistance payment, HAP, than currently are. I heard the Tánaiste talk about the social wage earlier on. This is a stealth cut of social housing support to hundreds of thousands of people. Weekly, more and more are losing all their years of waiting on the social housing list and their entitlement to housing assistance support. When will the Tánaiste give us a report on the review that he has been sitting on since the end of last year on raising the income thresholds for eligibility for social housing, which has been promised by this Government?

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