Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein)
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263. To ask the Minister for Environment, Community and Local Government the total annual allocation for housing assistance payment tenancies for 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017 in tabular form; and the total number of tenancies funded or expected to be funded for each year. [14258/16]

Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)
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Funding for the Housing Assistance Payment (HAP) scheme has increased year on year, since it commenced in September 2014, in order to meet the continuing costs of existing HAP households, and the costs of additional households being supported. The majority of this funding is to support ongoing rent payments to landlords in respect of existing HAP households and the cost of additional HAP tenancies as households find accommodation through the scheme during the year. In addition, funding also includes the operational costs of the HAP shared service centre and the costs of the HAP administrative payment made to local authorities operating the scheme.

Table 1 provides details of all voted Exchequer funding allocated and spent on HAP since the scheme commenced in September 2014 and the number of additional households supported by the scheme in each of those years, as indicated.

The resourcing of the HAP scheme in 2017 will form part of the normal Estimates process and will be based on the costs of continuing to support those existing HAP households at end 2016 and the cost of additional HAP households to be supported in 2017. Similar to the 2016 target, the Social Housing Strategy 2020sets a target of supporting an additional 10,000 households through the HAP scheme in 2017.

TABLE 1

Further information in relation to the number of households supported by HAP in each relevant local authority area is available on my Department’s website at:.