€558m per year being spent by State on HAP scheme

The head of the Department of Housing appeared before the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), where he faced questioning on the country's reliance on short-term housing solutions. 

A Public Accounts Committee (PAC) meeting heard that spending on HAP is currently €558m per year, with a total outlay for such housing supports at least €1bn

The head of the Department of Housing has faced a grilling over the country's spend on short-term rental supports instead of investing more money in the construction of new homes.

However, Graham Doyle, the secretary-general of the department, defended schemes such as HAP and RAS as having provided housing for thousands of people, while also conceding that more needs to be spent on new builds.

A report this morning from the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) had suggested that the Government must borrow €5bn a year, and double its spend on housing to €4bn, in order to stop house prices from spiralling.

Mr Doyle, who has been in his current role for less than a year, acknowledged that there is a need for long-term — capital as opposed to current — funding of housing to increase in order to remove a dependency on short term solutions such as the Housing Assistance Payment (HAP).

“We do certainly have to increase our capital spend,” he said.

“It’s very much the case that our hope is to increase capital spend to deliver more homes, but also to rebalance those current spending levels, so certainly as we work on developing the housing for all strategy and the National Development Plan review, there will be greater focus on capital elements."

At a hearing for his Department at the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), Mr Doyle said it is “very difficult” to set a target to end HAP because “it’s providing housing for 60,000 people”.

Much of the hearing became a discussion of whether or not supposedly short-term solutions such as HAP, which was first introduced in 2014, do more harm than good.

HAP sees a person locate their own rental accommodation which is then subsidised by a payment from the State. It offers no security of tenure.

The meeting heard that spending on HAP is currently €558m per year, with a total outlay for such housing supports at least €1bn.

Social Democrats TD Catherine Murphy suggested that the State’s current approach of persisting with HAP and the Rental Accommodation Scheme (RAS) is in effect “lazy”.

She said that the suggestion that phasing out the likes of HAP “doesn’t happen overnight” is no longer viable.

“I’ve been listening to ‘it doesn’t happen overnight’ since 2014,” she said.

Sinn Fein TD Matt Carthy asked how the State could justify spending €1bn in short term solutions over a period of 25 years “when it ends up with nothing to show for it as a real asset”.

Mr Doyle said, “We would certainly like to be in a position to provide as many new builds as possible funded by capital means. That hasn’t been possible in recent years."

Mr Doyle also said that without schemes like HAP and RAS, the State would not have been able to house thousands of people.

One of the main criticisms of HAP in recent years has been that it artificially massages homeless figures by providing housing with no security.

Asked whether or not HAP is a “poor substitute” for providing social housing by Sinn Fein’s Imelda Munster, Mr Doyle said, “Of course we’d prefer to deliver a house upfront”.

He said that the need to house people has “increased dramatically” since 2014.