Ciarán Nugent: Increasing spending on Housing Assistance Payment is a bad sign

'We need both wage increases and serious efforts to bring down the cost of housing,' writes Ciarán Nugent

'More and more people will need Hap and payments will have to go up and it’s already highly inflationary.'

Some new figures on the State-supported Housing Assistance Payment (Hap) were recently published for 2021 by electoral division. They showed that between 2019 and 2021 there was an increase of support for an additional 10,000 households, or 20%, to 60,000.

In 2021, the number of recipient households in the capital grew fastest. The top 18 electoral divisions, out of 167, were all in Dublin. The south-east inner city saw an increase of 49% in a year.