Dáil Éireann Debate, Wednesday - 5 October 2016
19. Deputy Richard Boyd Barrett asked the Minister for Housing, Planning, Community and Local Government the amount of money projected to be spent on the rental accommodation scheme, RAS, housing assistance payment, HAP, and long-term leasing programmes over each of the years 2017 to 2021, listing the cost of each programme separately; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [28687/16]
Amharc ar fhreagraIn my opinion, the dirty little secret about Rebuilding Ireland is that the majority of the so-called social housing the Minister intends to deliver will, in fact, be private housing. It will not work in the form of HAP. I was doing a tot on the graph on page 46 of the Minister's Rebuilding Ireland - an Action Plan on Housing and Homelessness. Approximately 80,000 of the social housing units the Minister plans to deliver between now and 2021 involve HAP. Then the Minister adds to those another 8,000 to 9,000 in leasing and another few thousand in RAS. I have made the point it will not work. Will the Minister tell me how much it will cost the Exchequer annually to fork out the money to those private landlords?
All three of the current expenditure funded schemes – the rental accommodation scheme, RAS, the housing assistance payment, HAP, and the social housing current expenditure programme, SHCEP, are critical components to the accelerated delivery of social housing envisaged under Rebuilding Ireland - an Action Plan on Housing and Homelessness. It is anticipated that more than 111,000 households will have their housing need met by one of these schemes in the period to 2021.
The annual cost of the three schemes to the Exchequer is made up of the continuing cost of supporting the tenancies and contracts in place at the end of the previous year and the additional cost of the new tenancies and contracts supported over the course of the year to which the allocation relates. The cost of the schemes in future years is, therefore, dependent on the number of housing units or tenancies falling to be funded within each of the schemes and the rental or lease payments involved.
In 2017, the housing assistance payment, HAP, scheme will support an additional 15,000 households, the rental accommodation scheme, RAS, will support an additional 1,000 households transferring from rent supplement and the social housing current expenditure programme, SHCEP, is targeted to secure an additional 2,250 social housing units using a variety of different delivery mechanisms, with each unit secured under the long-term availability lease arrangement. This level of increased output will necessitate increased financial support for these programmes in 2017.
The annual Estimates process is currently under way and my Department is working with the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform to finalise the necessary allocations for the delivery of these schemes in 2017.
We are not getting an answer. My figures were broadly correct. That scale of outsourcing of social housing to private landlords will be ramped up again and again to a total of 111,000, as outlined by the Minister, through the HAP scheme, the rental accommodation scheme, RAS, and leasing. That is what he just said. That will happen between now and 2021. That is set out in Minister's graph. Stop shaking your head; you just said that.
The Deputy should address his remarks through the Chair; I am not shaking my head.
I am looking at the Minister's graphs and at the figures he just gave me.
The SHCEP-----
The Minister did not answer the question regarding how much it will cost. If I picked him up wrong there, correct me. Under this plan, how many houses will be delivered up to 2021 by the HAP scheme, the rental accommodation scheme, RAS, and long-term leasing? I ask him not to tell me that he does not have estimated figures of how much that will cost the State. I can tell him that it does not take a rocket scientist to work out that it will cost us a fortune. That is as against directly building local authority houses, council houses that people who are on the local authority housing list want, which would generate a rental stream for us and mean that the State would have an asset.
Unfortunately, the reality is that we cannot do everything together. Not even the Deputy could deliver all the social houses within the timeframe that he seems to think is possible. The reality is that we have huge pressure on the system and there is no one silver bullet. What we need to do is to put sustainable, long-term tenancies in place where we can. We need to put long-term leasing arrangements in place where it is appropriate to do so. We need to have a very aggressive build programme, which we now have. I would ask for the support of local authorities in doing that and, for the most part, that has been forthcoming so far. A combination of all of those elements will deliver an extra 47,000 social housing units in terms of extra units into the system as well as an increasing number of people coming onto the HAP scheme, some of whom will move from rent supplement, which we are seeking to phase out, to have a much more sustainable, long-term supportive rental model, which will come under the HAP scheme. We are working with the realities we face to try to get good sustainable solutions for as many families as possible.
I want to correct the record with respect to an earlier remark. I want to stress that we are in favour of affordable housing; we are not against it. The Minister will not be able to deliver that unless he does what the Keane report proposed in the 1970s, which is to take control of all building land and make sure that we set the prices because the last affordable housing scheme failed catastrophically. It did not deliver any affordable housing because prices in the market went through the roof. The question is how do we control the market. The answer is that we build more social housing. That would provide low cost housing and it would also keep a lid on the market as a whole. Will the Minister answer the question about how much will this cost? It is obvious from what he is saying and from his report that the amount of money that will be going out from the Exchequer will increase exponentially over the next five or six years. I put it to him that would be money going out the door when he should be putting the money into local authority housing, which we would then own and from which we would secure rent. In the long term it would be better in that we would have better quality housing and it would represent better value for money for the State.
The truth is that it is a combination of both. Some people do not have any issue with being in long-term tenancies.
Only some do not.
The Deputy has this ideological perspective that the State has to control all this land and property. We are going to increase significantly the State's stock of social housing and we will build that increased stock as quickly as we can. We have funding in place of more than €5 billion for the next five years to do that. On top of that, we want to learn lessons from the past, to put secure and sustainable tenancies in place for families and individuals who need the help of the State to do that. The most efficient way to do that is to pursue the course of action we are taking, which is to shift people from rent supplement, over time, onto the HAP scheme and to take on many extra people who, unfortunately, cannot afford to secure tenancies in the private rental sector but are happy to rent as long as they have support from the State. That is where the HAP scheme comes in. From the take up of the HAP scheme to date and from the feedback we are getting on it, it is very positive. Perhaps in Dublin the approach to the HAP scheme is a little different. That is because it has not been rolled out in Dublin yet, except in one of the local authorities. We will be able to judge that much more accurately this time next year when we have it rolled out across Dublin.
Are there no costings?
The Deputy will see all the costings and details in the budget next week; they will all be published next week
