Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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60. To ask the Minister for Housing, Planning, and Local Government his plans to make legislative changes to ensure that persons in receipt of the housing assistance payment, HAP, are kept on the regular social housing list rather than on a transfer list; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [19867/18]

Eoghan Murphy (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael)
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The Housing Assistance Payment (HAP) is considered to be a social housing support and consequently households are not eligible to remain on the main housing waiting list. However, acknowledging that some households on the waiting list, who avail of HAP, have expectations that they would receive a more traditional form of social housing support, Ministerial directions have issued to ensure that, should they so choose, HAP recipients can avail of a move to other forms of social housing support through a transfer list.

Furthermore, local authorities were also directed that HAP recipients, who apply to go on the transfer list, should get full credit for the time they spent on the waiting list and be placed on the transfer list with no less favourable terms than if they had remained on the waiting list.

The practical operation of transfer lists is a matter for each local authority to manage, on the basis of their own scheme of letting priorities. The setting of such schemes is a reserved function of the local authority and as such is a matter for the elected members.