Senator Connaughton has given notice that he proposes to raise the matter of the urgency of completing arrangements for the payment of reconstruction grants for all applicants entitled to the grants.
Adjournment Matter. - Reconstruction Grants Payment.
An Leas-Chathaoirleach
I am very thankful to the House for allowing this discussion on the non-payment of reconstruction grants. I raise the matter out of sheer frustration, not alone on my own behalf but on behalf of many hundreds of people about whom we will talk in a few minutes. I am sorry I have to say that the performance of the Department of the Environment during the past 14 months certainly has been away below par as far as I am concerned. I believe there is a grave dissatisfaction throughout the length and breadth of this country with the non-action of the Department in relation to housing grants generally.
It is fair to say that the applicants, particularly the people that I specifically deal with in east Galway, seem to have been stymied in every way possible in the last ten to 12 months by this Department. I have lists of applicants who at this stage do not know if their applications have been accepted by the Department. Is it fair to inform the House how this has come about. The then Minister for the Environment made an order discontinuing reconstruction grants to any houses on 21 January 1980. There was about a week left for people who wished to make application under certain conditions, to hand their applications into the Department.
I know that something like 47,000 people made applications during that week. I want to go on record here today to say that I have to accept that there were grave problems in the Department for a few months until all those applications were processed, indexed and so on. I am not talking about that. I am talking about what is happening right now. I know several applicants who 14 months later are not sure if they have been accepted into the scheme. I know several others who have not had an inspection of their jobs, despite the fact that they had the reconstruction jobs finished in late 1979 or early 1980. I also know several applicants who wrote to the Department several times. I know one man who wrote 11 times and he never got an answer from the Department during the last 12 months.
When many people, including myself — and I contact the Department weekly — are told that their files are out with the inspector. The inspectors must have very large cars if they are carrying all those files around. I cannot understand, if a file was sent to an inspector in a region five, six or nine months ago, even with the backlog, why he cannot come to the householder in question.
Some of the bona fide applicants who applied before 1 February 1980 have been informed that their applications have not been received in the Department. Even if they were late, they could have been acknowledged by the Department as being late. As far as I can see from several queries I have made, the applications never got to the Department. Is it the Department of Posts and Telegraphs or the Department of the Environment who are at fault? I know that in several cases those applications were posted although unfortunately, I admit, they were not sent by registered post. They were certainly posted and some of them never arrived at the Department of the Environment in Dublin. Probably the worst factor of all is that for many people who had an inspection carried out, they had a hell of a long time to wait before they got their money.
There are a few questions I would like to ask the Minister this evening. Is it not possible to devise a scheme whereby the regional offices in Limerick, Cork and Galway could have inspectors for those areas? People from the local areas could go in and have a chat with them and find out if their file was in order and not have people waiting eight, ten and 12 months to find out if their application is in order, never mind getting the money. It is bureaucracy gone daft that a farmer or a householder of any description in Galway has to depend on O'Connell Bridge House in Dublin for his or her grant, considering we have similar offices in the various cities.
It is fair to put on the record of the House that it is a grave injustice to deny any householder £600, which was the maximum reconstruction grant. If he was entitled to get £600 12, 15 or 18 months ago, surely with inflation it is only worth £500 today. Why penalise those people? Why has there not been a determined effort to get the work inspected and the grant paid?
I have come across instances in the last couple of months where householders were involved in small reconstruction jobs under the old reconstruction grant system of a few years ago. This was the system where £200 was paid by the then Department of Local Government and £200 by the local authority. On several occasions I have come across people who did the work in question and got their £400 but four or five years later they found they had not done sufficient reconstruction. They found that in order to have a reasonable house they needed a bigger reconstruction job. I firmly believe that at least those people were entitled to the difference between the new grant and the old one. It could be argued that they could be entitled to the entire new grant. Evidence of the past few weeks suggests that those people will not get the difference in value between the two grants.
The Department have a duty to honour the existing reconstruction grants that are outstanding. It is only reasonable that the Minister should indicate this evening when he intends to have the grants paid to the majority of those people who have been waiting for so long. It could be argued that we could not expect the Department to tick over as efficiently as we would like in the first few months after the big in-flow of applications. Let nobody tell me that the Department could not create a system whereby grants, inspections and cheques could be sent out to householders after 14 months.
I ask the Minister this evening to give an undertaking to the House that it will not be another 14 months before some of those people get their money. I am sure the Minister is as well aware as I am of the grave financial hardship that people have to go through to try to reconstruct their homes to make them a little more pleasant and more comfortable. We are all well aware of the spiralling costs of building materials and of the actual cost of getting the job done through small builders and so on. Needless to say, although it is not relevant to the matter we are discussing, it was a disaster to withdraw the grants in the first place, but what makes it even worse is that people who are entitled to the grant still cannot get it.
One could argue that people who have reconstructed their houses in the last 12 months are not entitled to a grant as such because it was withdrawn by this administration, but at least they were never told that they would get one. If one were to take the number of people that I deal with who are living in hope of a grant and multiply it right across the country, we are talking about thousands of people. Will the Minister on behalf of those people give an undertaking that in the next couple of weeks the vast majority of them will either have an inspection as appropriate or get their money?
We have had reconstruction grants for many years now but we never had anything like the mix-up that we have at the moment. This episode will go down in the annals of history as the greatest bungling exercise ever created here by any Department. I hope the Minister will clarify the situation for us. On the way out this evening I will hand the Minister two long lists of applications to illustrate that I am not talking nonsense. Those people have been waiting for grants for a very long time. I hope that they and others will have better news as a result of this motion here this evening.
At the outset I must say that I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiments which prompted the Senator to raise this matter on the Adjournment, although I do not, of course, accept all of what he has just said. Indeed, I dare say that nobody has taken a greater interest than I have, since my appointment to my present position in December 1979, in seeing that applications under the house improvement grants scheme are processed with all possible speed and efficiency in the Department. I, therefore, welcome this opportunity of putting the real facts of the situation before the Seanad and of assuring Senators of my continuing endeavours to speed up the payment of grants.
Between 1 January and 1 February 1980 — the final date for the receipt of applications under this scheme — some 49,000 house improvement grant applications were received in the Department. Another 3,400 were received in the days following 1 February and approximately 1,000 of these were subsequently accepted on the grounds that they had been posted in time for delivery on the final day. This left a total of some 50,000 applications, including solid fuel grant applications, to be processed. The magnitude of that task can be gauged from the fact that the total number of improvement grant applications received during the whole of the preceding year, 1979, was 52,500 which, in itself, represented a record work load for the housing grants section. So the administrative structure which had been geared to handle in the region of 50,000 applications a year was hit by an avalanche of the equivalent of ten months applications in the course of ten days. Consequently it was not surprising that this structure buckled somewhat under this sudden and relentless pressure. Because the scheme had been terminated, great care had to be taken to see that all applications received were individually date stamped, acknowledged and recorded before the question of eligibility could be considered and the cases sent for inspections. It must also be appreciated that in addition to the improvement grant applications, approximately 10,000 new house grant applications had to be processed in the Department in 1980.
In all these circumstances it was inevitable that what had become the normal time scales for processing applications, arranging inspections and issuing payments could not be maintained, even with the best will in the world.
For Senator Connaughton's information, in County Galway 2,127 house improvement grants totalling £920,000 have been paid since 1 January 1980. Senator Connaughton spoke earlier about lost applications. Earlier today I answered a question in the Dáil in regard to lost applications and only about half a dozen have been brought to my notice by public representatives. The Department informed me that fewer than 50 lost applications have been brought to the notice of the Department.
Regulations are laid down under the Housing Acts and a statutory notice appeared in the papers in respect of that. It stated that where evidence of a posting could be produced before the expiry date the grant would be payable. Where we received letters posted on 31 January 1980 all those cases were looked after. We are talking here about fewer than 50 cases now. I asked the Department at that time to make sure that all correspondence in regard to housing grants was date stamped and recorded.
There is some confusion in regard to lost applications. If an application is sent out to an inspector of my Department and is lost in the post or lost in transit, it does not mean that the applicant will lose the grant because it has already been recorded on the index. We have a card which will state that the grant application whether it be for a back boiler or a new house has been recorded and if the file is lost we will make up a new file. If the applicant meets the criteria laid down in the regulations that grant will be honoured in full. There have been some misleading statements in regard to that, and I want to make the position straight. If an application is lost in transit it will be looked after, because once we have received the application in the Department it is recorded. If it is lost, we make up new files and if the applicant meets the regulations laid down under the rules we will honour that and pay that grant.
Last year we paid 51,000 housing grants. In the first two weeks of January, I paid more grants than the Coalition Government paid in the first half of 1977. In the first three months of this year to 31 March, I will have paid 19,300 grants and I will be paying, for the months of April and May, over 5,000 grants per month. The staff are and have been working for a long time now on continuous overtime. I have asked them to carry out the inspections as quickly as they possibly can and that is being done. A number of the people who applied at that time have not yet notified the Department of the completion of the work. I have to get the facts right on the real issue. I am prepared to stand up and defend that stance at any time. This year I and my Department will pay out over 51,000 grants. The staff in my Department are working very efficiently. I have never denied any Deputy or Senator the right to contact officials in my Department, as was alleged earlier, in regard to correspondence coming through my office. My officials have been asked to be courteous and to give information.
They are courteous.
I am glad the Senator agrees. Does the Senator deny that for the first three months of this year we have paid 19,300 grants and that my Department are working full time?
That is not what is wrong.
From the information that I receive from Deputies and Senators in this regard it is obvious that applicants give wrong names and addresses or they do not comply with the regulations. It makes it very awkward for the officials of my Department.
In regard to second grants, these cannot be paid within ten years of the first grant except where the work involves an extension required to relieve overcrowding and then the waiting period is five years. This is laid down in the Housing Acts. The condition was accepted by the Dáil and the Seanad without question when the Bills were before the Houses. If the conditions were not there, there would be nothing to prevent a person getting a succession of grants.
In regard to the old Coalition grants brought in by a previous administration, the Department of the Environment paid £200 of the grant and the local authority paid the other £200. Notice appeared in all the national newspapers stating that if the applicant did not notify the county council before a specified date he would not qualify for the supplementary grant from the council. I received very few complaints in regard to that because we gave good notice in all the daily papers.
The number of delayed cases is very small, but the inspectors, including a number of part-time inspectors, are looking after this work and they are attending to the cases as quickly as they possibly can. The staff in my Department are working continuous overtime to deal with this problem and I have met very little criticism from Members of the Dáil and the Seanad in general, a lot of whom have been very grateful to me. If any Member of the House asked me to show him a file on any grants paid, there was no problem about it and there shall be no problem. In co-operation with the officials of my Department I will deal with the position as quickly as I can.
The Seanad adjourned at 8.15 p.m. until 2.30 p.m. on Wednesday, 1 April 1981.