Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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200. To ask the Minister for Housing, Planning, Community and Local Government if he will commit to raising the issue regarding subsidiary earners on disability allowance being assessed for rent in council tenancies; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [29510/16]

Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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226. To ask the Minister for Housing, Planning, Community and Local Government if he will consider in his deliberations on the new local authority rent scheme removing both disability allowance and family income supplement for subsidiary earners from rental assessment; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [29487/16]

Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)
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I propose to take Questions Nos. 200 and 226 together.

The making and amending of rent schemes is the responsibility of local authorities as an integral part of their housing management functions, subject to broad principles laid down by my Department in Circular letter HRT 3/2002 of 6 March 2002. It is a matter for local authorities, when assessing individual households, to consider whether rents payable are in accordance with the authority’s rent scheme. Therefore, decisions on whether or not to disregard either a proportion of income or particular sources of income for the purposes of calculating rents are matters for each individual local authority to consider in accordance with their own rent scheme.

Section 31 of the Housing (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 2009 allows the Minister to make regulations in respect of various matters to be included in a rent scheme. These can include the sources of household income that may be assessed for the purpose of determining rent levels.

Considerable work has been carried out by my Department in developing a draft framework for a harmonisation of the approach to be taken by local authorities in regard to various aspects of rent schemes. This includes providing for a common set of income disregards to be applied by all housing authorities in determining a household’s assessable income for rent calculation purposes.

These proposals are now being examined further in the light of the broader commitment given in the Rebuilding Ireland Action Plan for Housing and Homelessness, to review the disparate systems of differential rents for social housing in place across local authorities to ensure that housing supports are fair and sustainable, prioritise those on lowest incomes and avoid creating social welfare traps that may prevent people from either returning to work or to the private housing market. This review will be completed by the end of Quarter 2 2017.