Would the Minister agree that while the national average for applications is 45 per cent, it is as low as 33 per cent in some areas due to the backlog of repairs needed to local authority houses? In some cases these are major structural repairs and local authority tenants have been reluctant to enter into arrangements for the purchase of such houses. Has the Minister any plans to introduce some form of appeal mechanism on the lines of that contained in the 1976 local authority tenant purchase scheme introduced by the then Minister, Mr. Jimmy Tully?

There was a very good response to this scheme, amounting to 40,655 out of a total of 91,000 tenants. Applications ranged from 100 per cent in one local authority area to 24 per cent in another. There was a wide variation. I recognise that some people may have been reluctant to purchase if they felt that their homes were not up to standard. It was intended that the local authority would estimate the market value of a particular house in its present condition. That allowed for the variations in prices being sought by the various authorities. If a person applied to buy a house on which repairs needed to be done, the price was reduced in lieu. Had it been part of the scheme that the house would have had to be repaired to a certain standard before the purchase scheme could operate, the scheme would have been a nonsense and would not have worked. Many people have applied because of the terms of the scheme as it exists.