Perhaps the Taoiseach will set out the Government response to the report by the Comptroller and Auditor General on housing rent supplement. He will know that the cost to the taxpayer of housing rent supplement went from €151 million in 2000 to €369 million this year. Whereas that is very bad value for the taxpayer, it is far more serious for the 60,000 people on rent supplement who cannot enter full-time work. This is a pot of gold for the landlords. In very many cases, it provides a bounty worth tens of millions to those already the beneficiaries of tax breaks to build the apartments that they now rent out. Once one is on housing rent supplement, one cannot enter the workforce, and that is surely the biggest poverty limbo created by this scheme. The Minister has made reforming comments at his usual Sunday afternoon press conferences, with some of which I agree. However, I have not yet seen the detail of any of those reforms.

The crisis is created by the absence of public authority housing. The Government has contrived to transfer its social housing needs to the private rented sector for the same reason. Taking public authority and voluntary social housing, approximately 6,500 units are being realised per year. That goes nowhere near meeting existing need. The cloud hanging over negotiations for a new social contract reminds one of the commitment made over three years ago to produce 10,000 affordable houses under Sustaining Progress, the social contract now expiring. That has not happened, and the reason that so many young women find themselves in such conditions is that they cannot afford a mortgage or get a public authority house.

My colleague, Deputy Gilmore, has been hammering away at this issue for years. On a recent Adjournment debate, he raised the issue of a young woman with three children who was paying rent of €1,200 per month. When she got married to someone earning €505 in a low-paid job, they immediately lost the €300 per week rent supplement, leaving them with €205 to live on, worse off than before their marriage.

The system is not working, but instead producing a social and poverty limbo. The Comptroller and Auditor General now bears out the arguments that have been made by Deputy Gilmore in this House for some time. I would like to hear the Taoiseach's response.

Deputy Rabbitte's question concerns the Comptroller and Auditor General's value for money examination, which was undertaken to determine the factors that gave rise to the rapid increase in expenditure on rent supplement between 2000 and 2005, to establish whether the Department had managed the scheme with due regard to economy during that period and to review the roles of the Department of Social and Family Affairs and the HSE in planning, managing and operating the rent supplement scheme. Rent supplement is administered by the Health Service Executive's department of community service on behalf of the Department. It is viewed as a welfare safety net for those with short-term income problems.

The main finding, of which Deputy Rabbitte will be aware, was that recipient numbers have increased from 42,700 to 60,000. The increase in numbers claiming and in average rent supplement are the main factors in the cost increase. Single parents make up a large, but not the only, element in that. The point was made that the Department must capture and report data allowing for informed analysis, and the Department has spelt out its reply. It has been suggested that it did not adjust rent limits downwards when rents were falling, but there is no evidence to support that. The Department froze rent limits in 2002. Together with subsequent measures, that has had a stabilising effect on rent limits in the relevant market sector.

The potential loss of rent supplement would act as a deterrent to taking up employment, the point that Deputy Rabbitte has highlighted. My response is that substantial measures have been taken to remove possible disincentives. We have introduced an improvement disregard of almost €200 and the tapered withdrawal of benefits as earnings increase. The Minister has stated his intention to continue that as it has been very helpful for those who wish to work. Deputy Rabbitte's points were more relevant to the previous situation when there was neither a disregard nor tapering. As in all such issues, the more one improves matters, the more people will have the opportunity to work. There are employment supports and special retention arrangements for those taking up employment, and those are all good. In a recent report, the Minister spelled out other areas in which he felt these issues should be examined, and those are matters for the Department in its budgetary exercise. However, there have been a number of improvements.

The Comptroller and Auditor General's other conclusion was that rent supplement had evolved from short-term support to major social housing assistance programmes, a point also made by Deputy Rabbitte. That is being addressed under the rent assistance scheme. Local authorities now have a specific responsibility to meet the long-term housing needs of this category on the basis of a phased implementation. When fully implemented, the arrangements will allow rent supplement to return to its original objective of short-term income support.

On the social housing issue, it is true that somewhere between 6,000 and 7,000 local authority houses will be started or acquired this year. The needs of approximately 14,000 households will be met from the range of social and affordable housing schemes. The provision for social and affordable housing this year is more than €2 billion. That is more than double the expenditure for the first year into which this report looked. This increase of €1.4 billion in Exchequer provision is an increase of 13% this year, so it is incorrect to state substantial resources are not being provided.

The Government has honoured its commitment in social partnership to make available during the course of the programme sites from the State's holding of 10,000 units. We have surpassed that. As I pointed out yesterday, the houses are under construction. It was never the case that they would all be built within the three-year period. Perhaps the House wants to set aside emergency legislation and ignore zoning and planning. It takes a developer six years to follow the process. Nobody in the trade union movement believed it would be done in under three years.

This crisis has arisen because of the rate of increase in house prices and the low output of social housing. Those are the twin causes so, therefore, it is part of the same problem. The output of public authority houses is now lower than in the mid-1970s. The Minister neutered Part V and, as a result, we now have approximately 4% of achievable affordable houses under that scheme. Under the savage 16 cuts made, the Government rowed back on many of the back-to-work measures to facilitate people entering the workforce. When the Taoiseach talks about the disregard, it is virtually meaningless in the context of a minimum wage which provides a basic subsistence rate per hour.

That €1.6 billion to landlords would have built 6,000 or 7,000 local authority houses. What we have had under Fianna Fáil is landlords benefitting from this pot of gold while the Taoiseach tells people they can live on sites. These 60,000 people cannot live on the sites which have been assembled over the past three or four years. They thought they were getting houses and not sites.

They could put up tents.

At the rate of building, more people are being forced into private rented accommodation. Even though they are capable and willing to go out to work, they cannot do so because of the impediments in the scheme. That is the issue and there is no point trying to kerfuffle or obfuscate it. I would like to hear from the Taoiseach or the Minister in his next press briefing not an analysis of the problem, on which we seemed to be broadly agreed, but what is going to be done about it.

The Minister for Social and Family Affairs has set out those issues, although Deputy Rabbitte might not like some of them. Substantial measures have already been taken to improve possible disincentives to allow people who want to work and are in receipt of rent supplements to do so. The Minister has improved income disregards. One cannot simply ignore them and have a situation where a person on any income can get a rent subsidy. The Minister has correctly improved the disregards. He would like to go higher than €200 over a period. He has tapered the withdrawal of benefits as earnings increase, which is the correct way to deal with this issue. We have given employment supports and provided special retention arrangements for those taking up employment.

In my world, one needs a site before one can build a house. I am not sure how one could do so otherwise. The State has done something which has not been done previously and certainly not since the 1930s. We have made available sites in the ownership of the State, including health board and departmental property, including Department of Defence property, so that we can provide affordable housing. Many of those houses are coming on stream, as are the Part V arrangements.

Comparing the situation with that in the 1970s shows how things have moved. At that time, proportionately, we were building more social housing.

Some 20,000 houses per year.

The reason we were doing so was that people were not working and were living in poverty, which they are not living in today. We are now building four times more houses than in the 1970s. Through a range of schemes, including social and affordable housing schemes, the shared ownership scheme and the Part V scheme, people are able to purchase their own homes even when they are on lower incomes. That has been proved in the figures each year.

This year we will spend €2 billion on social housing for those people who totally depend on it. That is a sizeable support of taxpayers' money to social housing which will help the needs of 14,000 households. The figure over the three-year period, as set out by the Minister, is of the order of 15,000 units of affordable housing between 2006 and 2008. These are substantial figures.