Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein)

I will not stop on each of these sections but I would like to ask a couple of questions further to my comments yesterday around the allocation scheme. I appreciate there is a lot of work to do on this with respect to the regulations. Subject, of course, to the Oireachtas still being sitting, perhaps there could be some mechanism for the Oireachtas joint committee to be consulted even informally on that, be it through a private briefing or committee meeting. As the Minister knows, many of us have experience of how allocation schemes and transfer schemes work for social housing. Would the Minister be willing to give a commitment in that regard? I am genuinely concerned and want to put it on record here again, notwithstanding that it is a good thing that we are moving towards having allocation schemes, that this could lead to a proliferation of different types of schemes, not just for different cost rental landlords but even within a single cost rental landlord across different schemes. I am cautioning against too much complexity which would have to be unwound after the fact. In the Tuath Housing cost rental units in my constituency, in Kilcarbery, we are already seeing tenants who are in exactly the same units paying significantly different rents for exactly the same properties, as the units were delivered in phase 1 and phase 2 of Kilcarbery Grange. We also need to avoid having very different allocation schemes or transfer arrangements if we put one in place in the same way. I urge the Minister to include in his regulations a facility for transfers and mutual transfers not just within a particular cost rental landlord but across cost rental units, given that the number in place at present is still small.

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