Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

At present there are approximately 92,000 families claiming benefit from a rent supplement payment. It is very important for us to mention the figures involved, in this time of very difficult economic crisis for most of our citizens and taxpayers who are ordinary people, on moderate levels of income. It is very important that we look at this issue from the point of view of the taxpayer in this country, ask whether we are getting value for money from landlords in this country and ask whether we are making the best arrangements for people who need support with their housing, of whom there are many.

Currently there are 92,000 people claiming and for them my Department is paying €436 million this year - a lot of money in anybody's language. I find the notion that we should not scrutinise that spending to determine if we can target it and spend it as well as possible and get the best possible value for money rather strange.

The total spend on the payment of rent allowance in the past five years, from 2007 to 2011, is approximately €2.4 billion. That is a great deal of money to have been spent under this heading on what is meant in policy terms to be a short-term housing support for people who lost their job and have rented accommodation. They need to be helped to hold on to their accommodation while they move on to another job or into education and training because we know the jobs market is tight. That is the reason the Department of Social Protection assists people with rent supplement.

The main purpose of the rent supplement scheme is to address people's short-term accommodation needs while they are temporarily unemployed. The aim is to provide short-term assistance and not to act as an alternative to the other social housing schemes operated by the Exchequer. However, more than half the current recipients of rent supplement, approximately 55,000, have now been on rent supplement for more than 18 months. Many of them have been on rent supplement for many years. I welcome the opportunity to discuss rent supplement but Sinn Féin, in all honesty, ought to examine rent supplement, what it has done and where it has worked. For instance, once somebody is in receipt of a significant amount of rent supplement it can have a hugely distorting impact on their capacity to return to work in that if they get €1,000 a month in rent supplement, that is €12,000 a year, any job they would take up would have to cover social welfare payments, perhaps for a family of four, plus €12,000 in rent supplement because if they were to take up a job they would lose the rent supplement. That is the reason I emphasise that we must examine this in a holistic way and liaise with the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government in that in recent years 40,000 families have been transferred from rent supplement to rental assistance schemes. When people do that, they are then like other local authority tenants, although living in private accommodation. They can predict, therefore, if they get an offer of a job, to what their differential rent is likely to rise. There is a disincentive in taking up an offer of employment because of the loss of the very large amount of rent supplement. Senator Ó Clochartaigh gave an example of a single person in Galway who was getting €450 a month.