Senator John McGahon- speech from 1 Feb 2022

Thank you very much Cairlock. Acting Leader, today what I want to really discuss is something that works across the board across all local authorities and to ask for a unified approach from government or a directive from the department about how local authorities should approach this because it's different than every other local authority and that is how people are removed from the housing list. So I can only speak from my own area. What happens in County Loudoun, I think it is deeply unfair and I felt it is deeply unfair since I first got elected to politics in 2014. But it's where every year local authorities need to make sure that they have accurate housing lists. They are right out to people to say, are you interested in staying in the housing list? If you don't respond to that letter, you're instantly removed from the housing list. That's fair enough. Where an individual can come back to a local authority and say, look, I either didn't update you on the list, I didn't update you about my new address, I didn't get the letter or I've moved address, but I now want to stay on the housing list. They are then allowed to go back onto the housing list, but they lose all the amount of years that they're on the housing list. I think that is so deeply unfair that someone could lose five, six, seven or eight years waiting for a council house because they didn't reply back to one single letter. And with all due respect to a local authority, they have absolutely no proof that that letter got to the individual in the first place. So what I think is really important is that there's a unified approach or some sort of a directive to come from the department down to all local authorities to say that this is how the standard should be dealt with across the board. I think where somebody comes along, let's say there are four years on the list, let's say after a year they've been removed, they've discovered that they were removed, they should be entitled to the four years that they had previously. They should be allowed to go back on the list with the same time that they had, and I think that would be a really fair thing to do. And that's why I would ask that we engage with the Department of Housing that some sort of directive is issued right across the board, across all local authorities, and that it's not different for people in County Lowes or County Mead or Kevin or Monaghan. Thank you very much.