I am grateful for the opportunity to raise this matter on the Adjournment. I was not completely satisfied with the answer given by the Minister to Question Nos. 7 and 8 today. I would like to point out that I am under a handicap in that the answer to the questions I put was given in the form of a tabular statement which was circulated after Question Time. I would like to record a certain degree of dissatisfaction about the fact that the answer was so given. The amount provided to each local authority was not shown. I only got the total sum. The figure I queried today is in relation to house purchase loans and supplementary grants.
The Minister in his Estimate speech last week said that the provision for local authority loans and supplementary grant schemes in 1974 was £20.85 million. The amount for a full year would be £27.8 million in 1974-75. On 19th July the Minister announced that there would be an extra £9 million bringing the total for 1974 to £29.85 million. That is for the transitional nine-month year ending on 31st December next. That is the figure which I received in reply to my questions today.
I asked the Minister the date on which the local authorities were informed of the allocations under the house purchase and supplementary grants headings. The Minister's reply, gave the date which has not been corrected since although I directed the attention of the secretary of the Ceann Comhairle's office to it and asked her to convey it to the Department of Local Government, as 8th June, 1973. In a note at the bottom it was stated they had not been informed at all. The Minister pointed out that under these headings £17.4 million was provided in the Estimates for 1974. He is adding £9 million to that to bring it to a total of £26.4 million. The Minister states that this would be £35 million in a full year.
The House will appreciate that this is an extraordinary turn about in the method of providing finance for the construction of private houses when one considers that the provision by the State last year under both headings was £25.49 million. It looks as if the figure will be in the region of £38 million this year, showing an increase of £13 million. I will refer to that figure later. Why did the Minister not refer in his Estimate speech last week to the inadequate amount of money which he had provided for the Local Loans Fund? In his Estimate speech last Wednesday the Minister stated that the Government had taken positive measures to provide finance for houses through an increased public capital programme. We were led to believe last week that the situtation was under control and that positive measures had been taken by the Government to deal adequately with the situation. In fact, the Minister went further and offered an insult to those who were concerned about the financial provisions being made for the housing industry by saying that people who were commenting on the housing industry should know better. Whose job is it to know better. He said they were misinterpreting statistics.
The day after that the Minister announced an extra £9 million for local authority housing loans. After not even four months of this financial year there is an admission by the Minister that something has gone wrong with his budget estimates for housing for 1974. It ill-becomes the Minister to refer in the terms he did to the people whom he felt should know better and who are commenting on his housing policy. These people have many pertinent questions to ask him. Why has the Minister not increased the maximum loans for local authority loans from £4,500? Why has he not increased the maximum income limit from £2,300? Why has he not taken action on the crisis in the building societies? One building society has gone out of business in this country.
I raised this matter on the Adjournment to ask the Minister to inform the House of the source from which this money is to be provided. The Minister's statement said that the extra finance would be provided by savings in other public expenditure. That is a vague sentence. This conveys nothing to the ordinary, intelligent person reading the statement issued from the Minister's office. It is incumbent on the Minister to inform the House where the cutback in expenditure is to be effected. He should tell the House whether the £9 million will involve a reduction in Estimates which have already been presented to this House for other Government Departments and were accepted by the House in good faith as firm Government commitments.