Vol. 399 No. 5
14 Mr. Pattison asked the Minister for the Environment if he is concerned at the fact that £500,000 has been transferred from housing allocation moneys in Dublin to roads expenditure; and if he will make a statement on the matter.
The local authority housing construction programme in 1990 is being funded from the internal capital receipts of local authorities supplemented by Exchequer resources. The allocations for the individual housing authorities were determined on the basis of their relative housing needs. As the resultant allocations were not matched by the level of internal receipts in every case it was necessary to redistribute some capital from those authorities with surplus capital receipts including Dublin Corporation and Dublin County Council, to those that were short. This transfer was effected by requiring those authorities with internal receipts surplus to their housing allocation to fund some of their road works programme from this surplus and by directing an equivalent amount of Exchequer funds for roads to housing authorities with shortfalls in their internal housing capital receipts. This arrangement does not affect actual expenditure on either the local authority housing programme or the roads programme.
Do I take it from the Minister's complicated reply that what has been described as a complicated piece of book-keeping has meant that money that was intended to be spent on housing was spent on housing and that money intended for roads was spent on roads?
It was a book-keeping exercise and the totals were not changed.
Does the Minister not regard that as a gross waste of administrative time at central and local government level?
It was not the most desirable way to deal with this but on this occasion, because of the receipts, this did not work out the way one would have hoped. However, I must point out that nothing was lost under the roads or housing programmes. It was simply that the available receipts were somewhat better in some administrative areas than others. The surplus of those receipts was transferred indirectly to other housing authorities with a shortfall of internal receipts to enable them in turn to provide more housing. This may sound convoluted but we are talking about a book-keeping exercise as far as the total allocation was concerned.
Am I right in assuming that what has happened through this complicated book-keeping exercise is that those on the housing list in Dublin have not had the benefit of a potential £500,000 being spent on their list because of the need to meet a shortfall in capital receipts in other local authorities?
I am saying that £500,000 was surplus to their housing allocation requirement and, consequently, it built houses in some other places.
If one of my constituents at my clinic at the weekend who is on the housing list asks about the position may I say that another person elsewhere in the country got a house at his cost?
No. We built houses somewhere else but the allocation was pro rata to the requirements and it did not mean that there were fewer houses built in any other area.
How can the Minister justify taking £500,000 out of Dublin city and county where there are several thousand people on the housing waiting lists and say that there was a surplus of money in Dublin? Will the Minister explain how there was a surplus of money in Dublin when there are people waiting for houses with no realistic prospect of being housed by a local authority? Some of those people have been on the waiting lists for years.
I am not going to get into semantics about this. I should like to tell the House that I transferred £3.8 million from roads to housing.
But not in Dublin.
That is putting it another way. Deputy Quinn has caught this right in that he said that the total amount was not minimised in any way. The total was decided on, the divide was decided on and then the total capital assets available to the Minister were provided.
There is a person sitting in a house in the country built with money from Dublin.
This sounds like discrimination against Dublin.
It does not. I transferred £3.8 million from roads to housing.
Will the Minister acknowledge that there is a larger fund of money available from internal housing receipts in Dublin because a larger housing stock is being sold? Will the Minister agree that there are more people on the housing waiting lists in Dublin, more than 5,000? Does the Minister consider his decision appropriate in the context of the loss of local authority housing stock sales? Will he agree that that money should be redirected to the provision of new houses for those on waiting lists? Some people at present on the waiting list in Dublin will still be on it in 20 years' time on the basis of new houses being built in Dublin city and county at the moment.
Internal capital receipts in the housing authorities amounted to about £45 million. They had to be supplemented by money from the Exchequer but this applied only to this year. The same internal receipts will not be available next year. It was purely a question of making the decisions in so far as the allocations are concerned, taking the total sum of money available to the Minister and dividing it, which is what I did.
It is scandalous to use Dublin Corporation money——
The Deputy has made that kind of comment in public before and he knows that it is not a just or fair assessment.
