I read with interest the housing document launched by the Government yesterday. While I welcome any initiative that will deal with the housing crisis around the country, I have said repeatedly that it needs three strands, short, medium and long term. It is clear from the document that the focus is almost exclusively on the medium and long term, referring to 2017-2020, a timeline beyond the lifetime of this Government and we can understand why. I see nothing in the document that will alleviate the current emergency situation that leaves hundreds of children homeless tonight. I had hoped to see something that would relax the rent supplement limits which are a key issue forcing people into homelessness.

In 2014, a total of €344.1 million was available in the social protection budget for rent assistance. That has been reduced to €297 million for 2015, a 14% cut at a time when rents are rising and there is a housing emergency. The medium and long term solutions are essential and many will come to fruition in 2020. That does not provide an immediate solution for the 800 children and the families who are homeless and will be homeless this Christmas.

The Government seriously underestimates the level of homelessness because there are countless families supporting relatives, allowing them to sleep on couches. I know whole families occupying one room, as I am sure the Tánaiste does, given the location that elected her. How long can a mother and her children sleep on a couch? That cannot be a semi-permanent solution, which it is at the moment. They cannot wait until 2017 for a solution. How many new houses will come on stream in the lifetime of this Government or is that known? Does the Tánaiste agree that the rent supplement limits are completely out of line with market rents? Will she seek a supplementary budget and immediately relax the rent limits to address or stall the homelessness crisis?

I am very concerned, as I know Deputy Catherine Murphy is, about any family which has problems securing a long-term tenancy or ownership of a family home. We all share a common objective to ensure that as many as possible of our people are properly housed. That was the purpose of yesterday’s announcement by the Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government, Deputy Kelly, the largest committed investment by this State in a very long time to a programme of social housing which will see all of the people on the waiting list housed over the next few years. It did not deal with all the money being spent this year to bring back some of the 2,000 flats and houses currently boarded up or ‘voided’, which is the term used by the local authorities. They are coming back and we anticipate that over the next six to nine months, 1,000 of those will be made habitable for families who need homes.

I want to correct one misunderstanding the Deputy may have about rent supplement. There is no reduction in the funding for renting homes in the private sector. In the Estimates for next year there is a provision to move a significant part of the current rent supplement budget dealt with in the Department of Social Protection to the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government to fund the move and the development of people moving onto the housing assistance payment. This reform has been widely welcomed because it will remove one significant difficulty for families on rent supplement, that very often if they get an employment opportunity they are not in a position to take up the employment because they may be at risk of losing their rent supplement. I assure the Deputy that there is no reduction whatsoever. There are just under 73,000 families or households availing of rent supplement at a cost of an estimated €344 million for this year. The same kind of costs will be incurred next year but some of them will be in the budget for the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government with those families who move to a long-term arrangement with a county council. There are very significant funds being used to address homelessness.

Of course people become homeless for a variety of different reasons. The protocol which has been in operation since the middle of June between the Department of Social Protection, organisations like Focus Ireland and the local authorities in the Dublin region has successfully secured ongoing tenancies for over 220 families. I want us to start looking at rent supplement cases on a case-by-case basis. There are two issues here. First, the community welfare service has discretion in law to raise the rent supplement.

It is not using it.

The other issue is that people on rent supplement are unable to go back to work because the conditions of the rent supplement scheme do not provide for differential rent, whereas the housing assistance payment and local authority differential rent systems allow people to take up work and calculate how much their rents might increase by.

The money that transferred across to the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government is still less than the budget that was available last year, even when the €20 million that transferred to the housing assistance payment scheme is taken into account. I accept the point that has been made about rent assistance as a poverty trap. I have made that point continually over the years. While I welcome the decision to address it, sufficient staffing resources will not be available at local government level to deal with it in a practical way. We are asking landlords in some areas to take a 30% reduction. That figure is based on the difference between the market rents and what will be available under the housing assistance payment scheme. There are very serious issues in regard to that.

There is no doubt that the Dublin area is the epicentre of this problem. I fully accept that. There are 90,000 individuals or families on the housing list nationally, some 45,000 of whom are in six local authority areas, including Kildare and Cork city. Even though I fully acknowledge that the problem of homelessness is at its most extreme in Dublin, I do not think the solution to it can be confined to that one area. Targets are being set for the next Government, or even the Government after it. This Government does not appear to be setting targets for dealing with homelessness progressively. It is completely unacceptable that a stone's throw from here, we can talk to people who are sleeping on the streets. The extent of this problem and the kinds of conditions in which people are living are being significantly under-estimated. We need to find better ways of capturing the true position of homelessness. It is not good enough for many family members to have to exist in one room, with four or five of them sleeping on the floor and three or four of them sharing a bed.

Hear, hear.

That is homelessness, but it is not being counted as such.

Yes. Hear, hear.

I agree with Deputy Murphy that the provision of good-quality, affordable housing to individuals and families is one of the biggest challenges facing Irish society. The allocation of €2.2 billion over the next three years is one of the basic social dividends from the budget. As I have said previously, it takes some time to build houses. The problem with the current housing market, which needs to be addressed as quickly as possible, is that no social housing has been built really since 2002. For reasons I do not fully understand, the then Government decided to move away from any provision of social housing by local authorities.

That is not true.

It decided, probably because so much house-building was going on, that all of this should be left to the private market.

What is the housing assistance payment but the private market?

The Tánaiste is not correct.

She could be correcting the record twice.

Some 73,000 households are being housed in the private market at present. The private market supply is tightening all of the time. The target for the increase in the number of houses by the end of 2015 is 15,000. This is not a long-term target. Deputy Murphy is correct when she says that there is a short-term objective, which is to bring all the voids into play. I refer to the 1,800 or 2,000 empty properties that are boarded up.

That is way off.

It has always been a mystery to me that councils can board up perfectly good houses. I think we will see a very significant change. In relation to the people who are homeless at the moment, the protocol I spoke about is available right around the country. I am happy to talk to the Deputy privately if she feels that a protocol like that which has been operating in Dublin since June would be of assistance in Kildare. I am perfectly open to that argument. I will conclude by reiterating that the community welfare service officers have discretion in law to deal with these problems.