Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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88. To ask the Minister for Housing, Planning, and Local Government the estimated cost to provide a home to each person on local authority homeless lists, that is, excluding use of the private rental market in 2021. [25717/20]

Darragh O'Brien (Dublin Fingal, Fianna Fail)
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Social housing supports are available to eligible households on the local authority waiting lists. If a household is homeless, and eligible for social housing, then the appropriate structure for their support will be determined by the relevant local authority having regard to their scheme of allocations.

The cost of delivering additional social housing homes is largely dependent on a range of key variables, such as the specific needs of the household on the local authority waiting list and the location and size of property required and any additional wrap around services that might be required in particular cases. Therefore we do not hold the level of information required to provide the estimated cost of providing a non rental market home to each person on a homeless list.

Local authorities do not focus on support for homeless households in isolation, and must balance the needs of all of those in their functional area. This includes having regard to time spent awaiting an allocation of housing for example. In working to provide a long term solution to the provision of housing in Ireland through increasing delivery, it is also of paramount importance that any action needs to consider short, medium and long-term solutions, harnessing the capacity of what is available while building the stock in parallel. It is for that reason that the Government takes a blended approach, recognising the need for wide toolkit of delivery mechanisms; accessing the immediate availability of existing properties through acquisition or leasing arrangements, with a particular focus on harnessing the capacity of vacant properties, while at the same time facilitating local authorities and Approved Housing Bodies to significantly enhance their own build programmes.

This includes support through accommodation sourced from the private sector, and this support structure cannot be discontinued as to do so would jeopardise the accommodation of tens of thousands of households for whom there is no immediate alternative. During the period 2016-2018, the housing needs of some 91,000 households received housing support across the range of non-state owned accommodation, including long-term leasing, HAP and RAS. This included continuing to provide support to those already in homes supported under the programmes concerned, and also the additional tenancies established during that period. If the funding provided for these 91,000 households had been transferred to capital expenditure, to support building or buying homes directly by LAs, it would have secured approximately 5,500 homes, leaving no resources available to support the other 85,500 households. Alternatively, it would take almost €20 billion to provide a new build local authority home for each of those 91,000 households.

While the objective is to provide immediate social housing support, and ensure that households have accommodation, the long term preference of a household to be accommodated in more traditional “allocated” setting can be accommodated through transfer lists. As we develop more Built, Acquired and long-term leased homes, the reliance on the private rented sector is reducing. Indeed by end 2018 there were almost 6,000 fewer tenancies supported through Rent Supplement, Rental Accommodation Scheme or HAP than at end 2014, when the HAP scheme commenced.