State pays €500m a year on rent supplement

THE Government is paying in excess of €500 million annually on rent supplement for 94,000 people – despite four years ago devising a money-saving scheme to move them off the emergency payment.

Rent supplement was originally intended as a short-term payment. But with numbers in receipt of it growing year on year, the Government drew up plans to move all those in receipt of rent supplement for 18 months or more across to the new Rent Allowance Scheme (RAS).

However, latest figures show that more than 35,000 people eligible for RAS are still being paid rent supplement.

Labour spokesperson on social and family affairs Róisín Shortall said everybody should be moved off rent supplement, except for a small number of emergency cases, and onto the RAS scheme. This could save at least €50m annually, Ms Shortall said.

“Rent supplement is an enormous drain on public resources. It is unsustainable and it seems to make eminent sense for people to change to the RAS,” she said. “Why are we not encouraging them all to do so as quickly as possible?”

Ms Shortall said the targets for moving people from one scheme to the other and which are set by the Department of the Environment, were very conservative.

This year, the target number of people to move from rent supplement to the RAS scheme is 8,000, despite some 35,000 people qualifying to transfer to RAS.

Once people are on RAS, they are deemed to be in need of long-term housing and in line for local authority housing.

However, Fine Gael’s Olwyn Enright said there was a problem as people feared they would not be fairly assessed for local authority housing if they are in good quality accommodation.

Fine Gael’s Catherine Byrne said there was a serious backlog in the housing system. People originally accepted for RAS who where told to wait for four years “are being told by the local authority that it has no accommodation for them”.