Results 16,061-16,080 of 28,162 for speaker:Catherine Murphy

Public Accounts Committee: 2017 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Chapter 10 - Funding and Oversight of Approved Housing Bodies
Vote 34 - Housing, Planning and Local Government
2017 Financial Statements - Housing Agency (25 Oct 2018)

Catherine Murphy: Does the payment continue after a mortgage is discharged?

Public Accounts Committee: 2017 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Chapter 10 - Funding and Oversight of Approved Housing Bodies
Vote 34 - Housing, Planning and Local Government
2017 Financial Statements - Housing Agency (25 Oct 2018)

Catherine Murphy: A point was made about the local property tax, which crops up in this chapter. The Department has provided us with some useful documentation. This is the reply we received on 25 October, PAC32-R-1670 A. It shows the various subsidy and grant levels, including the local property tax. It states there has been a surplus of local property tax receipts to fund housing programmes and gives...

Public Accounts Committee: 2017 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Chapter 10 - Funding and Oversight of Approved Housing Bodies
Vote 34 - Housing, Planning and Local Government
2017 Financial Statements - Housing Agency (25 Oct 2018)

Catherine Murphy: We will revert to it when we see it. I will pick Mr. McCarthy up on something that he mentioned in his opening statement. He said: "The numbers presenting to homeless services continue to be very challenging." He also referred to "pathways to more sustainable housing." He stated: "A record 4,729 adults exited homelessness into an independent tenancy in 2017." Nearly 10,000 people were...

Public Accounts Committee: 2017 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Chapter 10 - Funding and Oversight of Approved Housing Bodies
Vote 34 - Housing, Planning and Local Government
2017 Financial Statements - Housing Agency (25 Oct 2018)

Catherine Murphy: The number has been growing and stayed consistent. It is not that there is a huge difference between July and September, either last year or this year. This number is one to be added to the number at the end of the year who will have experienced homelessness.

Public Accounts Committee: 2017 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Chapter 10 - Funding and Oversight of Approved Housing Bodies
Vote 34 - Housing, Planning and Local Government
2017 Financial Statements - Housing Agency (25 Oct 2018)

Catherine Murphy: The point is that way more people than 10,000 experience homelessness in a year. To be honest, one of the things that prompted us to have this session and the other later in the autumn session is the lack of clarity and transparency on the various housing solutions. Very often there is a degree of spin, not necessarily from the Department but politically, on the number of houses built, as...

Public Accounts Committee: 2017 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Chapter 10 - Funding and Oversight of Approved Housing Bodies
Vote 34 - Housing, Planning and Local Government
2017 Financial Statements - Housing Agency (25 Oct 2018)

Catherine Murphy: The Department differentiated the internal language between the schemes and the external consumption of information.

Public Accounts Committee: 2017 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Chapter 10 - Funding and Oversight of Approved Housing Bodies
Vote 34 - Housing, Planning and Local Government
2017 Financial Statements - Housing Agency (25 Oct 2018)

Catherine Murphy: The thing about it is that it is still vague. For example, the Budget Statement outlined that there was leasing, acquisitions and builds. Very often the way it is reported to the public is that there are 10,000 new homes when in actual fact some of them are not new. In the leasing category the figure can include the leasing of existing houses. It is important that we find out how many...

Public Accounts Committee: 2017 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Chapter 10 - Funding and Oversight of Approved Housing Bodies
Vote 34 - Housing, Planning and Local Government
2017 Financial Statements - Housing Agency (25 Oct 2018)

Catherine Murphy: I will ask Mr. McCarthy about another aspect. Local authorities go through a four-stage process from beginning to end, from identification of a site to tender stage. A single-stage process was initiated, but it appears that there is a very low uptake. Why is that?

Public Accounts Committee: 2017 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Chapter 10 - Funding and Oversight of Approved Housing Bodies
Vote 34 - Housing, Planning and Local Government
2017 Financial Statements - Housing Agency (25 Oct 2018)

Catherine Murphy: Therefore, there was a financial risk.

Public Accounts Committee: 2017 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Chapter 10 - Funding and Oversight of Approved Housing Bodies
Vote 34 - Housing, Planning and Local Government
2017 Financial Statements - Housing Agency (25 Oct 2018)

Catherine Murphy: Yes, that is what people are looking for, namely, that there be no impediments. I can understand why local authorities would try to make sure they would not be financially exposed, but it should be possible to work through it internally. I wish to focus on the various schemes in terms of value for money achieved. Has the Department examined, for example, the HAP scheme over the lifetime of...

Public Accounts Committee: 2017 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Chapter 10 - Funding and Oversight of Approved Housing Bodies
Vote 34 - Housing, Planning and Local Government
2017 Financial Statements - Housing Agency (25 Oct 2018)

Catherine Murphy: Is that the totality of the documents to which we can refer in terms of answering the questions I asked about evaluations having been done from a value for money perspective?

Public Accounts Committee: 2017 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Chapter 10 - Funding and Oversight of Approved Housing Bodies
Vote 34 - Housing, Planning and Local Government
2017 Financial Statements - Housing Agency (25 Oct 2018)

Catherine Murphy: We are continually being told that it takes time to build houses, that there is a pipeline and a lead-in time and so forth. The Land Development Agency has been set up, which offers the prospect of delivering affordable houses if there is the right mix of social and affordable houses. If there is inadequate capital available, will that have an impact on the mix or slow the work of the Land...

Public Accounts Committee: 2017 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Chapter 10 - Funding and Oversight of Approved Housing Bodies
Vote 34 - Housing, Planning and Local Government
2017 Financial Statements - Housing Agency (25 Oct 2018)

Catherine Murphy: When the voluntary code was being put in place for approved housing bodies, AHBs, we were told that without such a code it would be impossible to draw down funding from the European Investment Bank, EIB, because that was a requirement for that type of investment. We were also told that there would have to be some sort of partnering from the Government side because AHBs, which are mostly...

Public Accounts Committee: 2017 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Chapter 10 - Funding and Oversight of Approved Housing Bodies
Vote 34 - Housing, Planning and Local Government
2017 Financial Statements - Housing Agency (25 Oct 2018)

Catherine Murphy: We know the numbers who are becoming homeless.

Public Accounts Committee: 2017 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Chapter 10 - Funding and Oversight of Approved Housing Bodies
Vote 34 - Housing, Planning and Local Government
2017 Financial Statements - Housing Agency (25 Oct 2018)

Catherine Murphy: How would the Department not count them on the other side?

Public Accounts Committee: 2017 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Chapter 10 - Funding and Oversight of Approved Housing Bodies
Vote 34 - Housing, Planning and Local Government
2017 Financial Statements - Housing Agency (25 Oct 2018)

Catherine Murphy: What is the 92%?

Public Accounts Committee: 2017 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Chapter 10 - Funding and Oversight of Approved Housing Bodies
Vote 34 - Housing, Planning and Local Government
2017 Financial Statements - Housing Agency (25 Oct 2018)

Catherine Murphy: It was worth expanding out on the homelessness crisis because that 4,700 figure jumped out for me this morning, as it does every time. It may be down to our different experiences in dealing with people coming into our constituency offices. Last Friday three new families came into my office in the space of an hour. It usually happens on a Friday afternoon when I can do very little about it....

Public Accounts Committee: 2017 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Chapter 10 - Funding and Oversight of Approved Housing Bodies
Vote 34 - Housing, Planning and Local Government
2017 Financial Statements - Housing Agency (25 Oct 2018)

Catherine Murphy: I spoke earlier about spin or flowery language. I took a paragraph from one of the documents we got, which stated it is worth noting that 1,074 units went on site in quarter 2 of 2018, which is an increase of 27% on the previous quarter, which was 846, and an increase of 239% on quarter 2 of 2017. I accept the percentages are right, but the numbers are tiny relative to the scale of the...

Public Accounts Committee: 2017 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Chapter 10 - Funding and Oversight of Approved Housing Bodies
Vote 34 - Housing, Planning and Local Government
2017 Financial Statements - Housing Agency (25 Oct 2018)

Catherine Murphy: We need to have sight of that when the Department receives it to see what progress has been made here. It would be worth exploring what those failings were because they would not be pointed out as recommendations if there were not failures in those areas. The number of questions the local government audit threw up certainly shows that there is an issue with oversight here. Given that this...

Public Accounts Committee: 2017 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Chapter 10 - Funding and Oversight of Approved Housing Bodies
Vote 34 - Housing, Planning and Local Government
2017 Financial Statements - Housing Agency (25 Oct 2018)

Catherine Murphy: It does not make sense without that breakdown. I refer to the drawdowns of the loans by the Housing Agency at the end of 2018. Obviously this was under the Rebuilding Ireland home loan. By August 2018 only 57 loans had been drawn down. Are there many more in the pipeline? Has this not succeeded? What are the impediments? What have we learned from that? I presume someone from the...