No Government proposals to cap number of social housing refusals – Taoiseach

By Gráinne Ní Aodha and Cillian Sherlock, PA

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has said the Government has no proposals to cap the number of times people can refuse an offer of social housing.

He said that, in the past two years, 5,000 people on a social housing waiting list had turned down an offer, adding that “they had the right to do so”.

Mr Varadkar has been criticised after stating that there are “plenty of cases” in his Dublin West constituency where people in emergency accommodation for years have turned down “multiple offers of accommodation”.

On Thursday in the Dáil, Sinn Féin TD Pearse Doherty accused Mr Varadkar of attempting to “shift blame” away from the Government’s housing policies.

Mr Varadkar said he had been misrepresented but amended his comment regarding the amount of people in emergency accommodation refusing social housing from “plenty” to “some”.

When asked on Friday whether he believed there should be a cap on the number of times a person can refuse offers of social housing, Mr Varadkar replied “I don’t”.

“The situation is that, in the past two years, about 5,000 people on the housing list have turned down an offer of social housing, and they had the right to do so.

“The reasons are documented, you know, sometimes they are good reasons, sometimes they’re not. But we do allow people the right to refuse.

“One of the best things we’ve brought in recent years is a system called choice-based letting.

"So instead of offering somebody a property which they can then accept or reject, they can look at what’s available, and then be the ones that then make an offer for that property. I think that’s worked a lot better.

“But we don’t have any proposals to cap the number of times people can refuse. But it is the case that it is a fact that in the last two years about 5,000 people have refused, often, for good reasons, maybe not always.”