Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said the government had no proposal to set how many times people could turn down offers of social housing, reports Breaking News.
He said 5,000 people on the waiting list for social housing had declined an offer in the last two years, adding that “they had a right to do so”.
Mr Varadkar has been criticized for “plenty of cases” in his Dublin West constituency where emergency people have been turned away with “multiple offers of accommodation” over the years.
Asked on Friday whether there should be a limit to the number of times a person can decline an offer of social housing, Varadkar said “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,” reports Breaking News.
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