Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent)
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617. To ask the Minister for Housing, Planning, and Local Government if he will consider disregarding an increase for qualified child payments in calculating local authority and housing association differential rents as permitted under section 31 of the Housing (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 2009; the estimated full year cost of such a change; if he will examine the methods used by local authorities and housing associations to calculate rent; and the status of his Department's framework for standardising or harmonising approaches to be adopted by local authorities in relation to various aspects of rent schemes and rent calculation. [41684/17]

Eoghan Murphy (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael)
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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 its 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, including 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 have been 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.

I expect the results of this review to be available shortly.