Dáil Éireann díospóireacht -
Thursday, 7 Dec 1995

Vol. 459 No. 5

Written Answers. - Rent Supplements.

Joe Walsh

Ceist:

85 Mr. J. Walsh asked the Minister for Social Welfare if he intends to address the issue of the needs of persons in local authority housing rentals in relation to supplementary welfare allowance rent supplements as against tenants in private rented accommodation; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [18419/95]

Minister for Social Welfare (Proinsias De Rossa)

Under section 179 of the Social Welfare (Consolidation) Act, 1993, a weekly supplement may be paid in respect of rent or mortgage interest to people in receipt of social welfare or health board payments.

The purpose of rent supplements is to assist the reasonable accommodation costs of eligible persons living in rented accommodation who are unable to provide for their accommodation costs from their own resources, and who do not have accommodation available to them from another source.

Local authority tenants pay an income-related, differential rent in respect of their accommodation. Responsibility for making and amending differential rent schemes lies with the local authorities since August 1986. Guidelines issued by the Minister for the Environment at the time require local authorities to ensure that rent schemes adopted by them are based on certain broad principles.

One of these is that the rent payable should be related to income and a smaller proportion of income should be required from low income households. A further requirement is that:

"provision should be included for the acceptance of a lower rent than that required under the terms of the scheme in exceptional cases where payment of the normal rent would give rise to hardship"

(Department of the Environment Circular Letter HRT 6/86).

While local authority tenants are not precluded from applying for rent supplements under the current provisions of the supplementary welfare allowance scheme, it has been the policy of my Department not to pay rent supplements to tenants of local authority accommodation. It is considered that the need for such supplementation should not arise because of the nature of the differential rent schemes, that is, the ability of the local authorities to relate rents to household income and the option to invoke the "hardship clause" where appropriate.

Furthermore, the payment of supplements in such cases would result in an inefficient use of resources with two Departments of State individually addressing the same problem.