The housing crisis continues unabated with people on average incomes essentially being locked out of the prospect of buying a home of their own and a great many people literally being bled dry by soaring housing rents. The number of people who are homeless continues to rise and, most shameful of all, there are now almost 4,000 children among this number. The cost of housing is now the single biggest driver of the high cost of living for people yet the Government continues to drag its heels in responding adequately. Throughout this crisis Fine Gael continues to pretend that the market can solve the problem. It has taken the least effective and most expensive approach to increasing housing supply. Over-reliance on the private sector has gone hand in hand with the stated objective of raising house prices. That was first made clear by the then Minister, Deputy Noonan, and continued by successive Ministers. What has mattered most to Fine Gael is the balance sheets of our disgraced banks and bailing out speculators and developers. This has taken complete precedence over what should be people's right to affordable housing. How else can the Government explain the failure to build on the substantial public landbanks that we have? How else can it explain the inordinate delay in finalising an affordable housing scheme? That scheme has been promised for years and it has yet to take effect.

A number of the larger approved housing bodies have come together to respond to this crisis and are putting it up to the Government to support them. They have capacity to provide a major social and affordable cost rental building programme commensurate with the scale of need that exists. To do so, however, they have three asks of Government. First, tier 3 approved housing bodies need to be reclassified as off-Government balance sheet in order that they can avail of funding, which is available and being offered to them on a constant basis, and which should be utilised. The Minister, Deputy Eoghan Murphy, has promised this but there was no timeline set out for when this will happen. It seems we are yet into another long period of promises from the Minister without any action. Failure to act on this will have a negative impact on the potential major output of social and affordable homes from this sector. Second, new and sustainable, affordable, rental and cost-rental schemes beyond the current small pilot schemes are urgently needed. Why is Fine Gael delaying the introduction of these schemes? Action is urgently needed to accelerate the availability of social and affordable homes. Third, changes to the capital advance leasing facility have caused cashflow problems for these housing bodies and these constrain output. They need to be reversed as soon as possible.

I do not believe we disagree that we need to significantly increase the output of housing of all types but the Deputy, like many others, misrepresents what the Government is doing in terms of its housing policy, and whether it is deliberate or not, I do not know. The idea that the Government has an ideological approach of relying on the market to solve the problem is simply not borne out by what we are doing. We have spent €2.4 billion this year building public housing. We will add an extra 10,000 housing units this year to the social housing stock. Next year, the number will be higher than that, probably close to 12,000. We have committed over a number of years to dramatically increase our social housing stock. What we must do in the meantime, because of the pressures in regard to social housing, is to try to find accommodation for people in the private rental market where possible. Last year, approximately 25,000 housing solutions were provided for people in need through social housing, as well as through supported rental accommodation. Clearly, we want to move away from the current reliance on the private rental market to find homes for people who cannot afford to pay for themselves, but the social housing stock must be built up to do that. We have also committed to a €300 million affordable housing scheme, which was signed off in the last budget and which will be delivered over the next two years. We are strategically managing public landbanks in a different way now from what was done in the past. The rent Bill, which was finalised yesterday evening, provides more protections for tenants, as are needed, and changes to rent pressure zones to make sure that effectively we are putting in place limitations in terms of rental inflation in parts of the country where there are significant pressures.

The Deputy should not misrepresent what we are trying to do. There are genuine problems in terms of housing pressures. We are reminded every week, as we should be, of the challenge in regard to homeless families, homeless individuals and, in particular, homeless children. An urgency is needed from Government to solve the pressures that many of those families are under but we are not doing it, as the Deputy would suggest, by simply relying on the market to deliver over time in its own time. Quite the opposite is the case. We have intervened in the market in multiple ways and we are spending billions of euro over a number of years to deliver a social housing stock that can meet demand.

Eight years into government and the Tánaiste is still talking about what he will do about the housing crisis.

No, we are doing it. It is happening.

The Government's record has been appalling in this area. It is spending vast amounts of public money on housing but most of that is going into the pockets of private landlords or else it is buying expensive turnkey housing rather than building it directly through local authorities. It has promised for years to introduce an affordable housing scheme. The Tánaiste is still talking about it but it has not started yet. I have raised this umpteen times and he has denied that this is the case. We do not have affordable housing programmes under way at present. Local authorities are crying out for them. The approved housing bodies have the capacity to deliver large numbers of social and affordable rental schemes if the Government would take those three actions they require. Why is the Government holding back on those? What we need now is action not empty promises, which is all we have had to date. There are ways to address this effectively that would ensure we have an effective response and that it would be done in a cost-effective way. Unfortunately, Fine Gael is yet again using the most expensive approach to tackling a major issue.

At the very end of the Deputy's contribution we got what this is about, which is about party politics rather than delivering.

No, it is not. It is about Fine Gael wasting public money.

The Tánaiste without interruption.

I did not interrupt the Deputy.

Deputy Shortall is well aware of the rules.

So we are now wasting public money trying to put people into stable accommodation-----

It is not stable.

Answer the question.

-----and trying to take them out of inappropriate but improved emergency accommodation. By the way, I am a big believer in approved housing bodies, as they know from when I was Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government, and the current Minister is as well. That is why we are funding them to the tune of tens of million of euro each year. That is why we brought the European Investment Bank into Ireland to fund approved housing bodies and build the estates that have been built and are housing people right now.

With regard to reclassifying approved housing bodies to take them off-balance sheet, we would like to do that and we are in process of trying to get that done with the European Commission through a review that is being held currently by the Department of Finance.

What is the timeline?

I have had direct conversations in that regard and it is not straightforward. It certainly is not being held up because of a lack of appetite from the Government. The issues raised by the Deputy are being addressed. We are not just talking about it; we are delivering thousands of homes now that were not being delivered a few years ago.

There is no timeline.