Paschal Mooney (Fianna Fail)

All sides of the House welcome the Sinn Féin motion. I share the view that rent supplement is only a short-term policy. The ultimate solution is to move the 94,000 recipients into permanent accommodation, either through local authorities or by employing NAMA properties to tackle the social housing waiting lists. It is interesting that the figures from 2005 up to June 2012 show a 60% increase. This is significant, in that even at the height of the Celtic tiger period housing boom there were 60,200 people in receipt of rent supplement. That would seem to suggest that even at that point, with the housing market going out of control, it was still impossible for people to look after their own housing; they had to rely on State subsidy. Here we are at the other end of the scale, where house prices have fallen dramatically to some 60% below what they were in 2006-07, yet there is an increase to 94,000 people who are now in receipt of rent supplement.

Fianna Fáil would support the Minister in attempting to make savings by reducing rent supplement expenditure. On the one hand, the supplement addresses a particular short-term need, on the other it affects the housing market, depending on the part of the country. In establishing the rent limits, the Department announced a countrywide average of some 23% reductions in rent allowance. This reduction, however, differs county by county, with reductions ranging from 0.08% in Cork for a couple or a single parent with one child, to a staggering 44.9% in County Roscommon for a couple or single parent with two children. I do not have the figures for County Leitrim but I would say they are as high, if not higher. Perhaps the Minister might have something to say about the variations throughout the country in that regard.

The Minister also indicated that letters have been issued, advising welfare tenants of the new maximum levels when their lease is due for renewal. I am sure the Minister will take this opportunity to clarify the situation but we understand that a number of letters have already been sent out in various local authority areas stating that tenants have until a specific date, unrelated to their lease, to renegotiate their rent with the landlord or, alternatively, seek other accommodation. There is obviously a clear disconnect between the Minister's announcement that reductions come into force upon the renewal of leases, which I understand occurs once every 12 months, and the letters being sent out by social protection offices in various counties, stating that tenants must renegotiate by a certain date. Again, I am sure the Minister will clarify that.

Whether NAMA should be brought in to tackle social housing waiting lists is a moot point. There are many ghost estates throughout the country, with many unoccupied houses. Speaking from my own experience, such houses in my county and surrounding counties are there primarily as a result of the Shannon tax incentive scheme which, in its initial conception, was an excellent scheme, essentially intended to repopulate counties such as mine, Cavan, particularly west Cavan, Roscommon, Longford and part of east Sligo. That was fine but the Government then decided, under pressure from the building lobby - I cannot think of any other reason- to extend the scheme. In my part of the country at least, it was the extension of the scheme that caused the surplus housing. This happened in my home town. That was where the big mistake was made because this was not necessary. The questions kept being asked: where would the people come from to populate these houses on the fringes of towns and villages across my county; where would the jobs be provided for them to do so?

That said, there is anecdotal and even stronger evidence that some sort of social housing engineering has gone on, with people being relocated out of some of the Dublin constituencies and down the country. There are certain social implications attached to that because they are effectively being parachuted from one type of environment, an extreme urban one, into what is probably an extreme rural environment. This brings its own social difficulties - there is no question about it. Although in principle I agree with many of the people who are raising their voices about using ghost estates and unoccupied houses, in particular the NAMA-controlled ones, to address this issue, I would proceed with severe caution. I do not want to call this social engineering - one cannot account for human behaviour - but I believe there are social consequences that arise from taking people from one environment and putting them into another, taking them from one extreme to another.

I am sure the Minister has an opinion on the whole NAMA issue and on what to do with some of these estates and I would be grateful to hear her views in that regard. Perhaps the best way forward is for the Departments of Finance and Social Protection and NAMA to get together and see if there is some way of sorting this out. Overall, I take on board the points Sinn Féin made. I agree with the broad thrust of the Minister's policy in that there is a need to reduce this reliance on supplement. I confess it had not occurred to me it was a short-term or stop-gap measure. I had never thought about it other than to think it was there because it was there. However, although it is a short-term measure and only intended to address short-term housing need, it now seems to be a given. It is certainly distorting the market in some areas. Although it may be affecting markets in the wrong way, in the current state of the housing market - I refer again to my county, encompassing the counties I mentioned - rental income is very low because of the surplus of housing. There is such a wide choice both for those can afford it and those who seek such housing because they have rent supplement, that people are negotiating downwards rather than upwards in many cases. Again, I would treat with caution lobby groups representing landlords who claim they are losing out to an extraordinary extent because of rent supplement. It is not because of the supplement but because there are too many houses and because the current competition is so vast. The options for people who want to rent are considerable. Until that issue is addressed there will be no change in the status of rental income.