Jonathan O'Brien (Cork North Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I have told the Minister of State previously that I think she has a very difficult job. Despite what many people say, the housing problem is not something that can be solved by throwing money at it. More complex issues than that are at stake. I would like to touch on some of them and make a few comments about the Bill.

The Bill deals with the area of evictions, which is difficult to deal with. The residents of many housing estates face the daily and nightly reality of the severe anti-social behaviour of a small minority of tenants. Such behaviour is not exclusive to local authority housing estates - it happens in every private and local authority housing estate. As I always say to people, at least there is some comeback when it happens in local authority estates. It is sometimes easier to go through the process to be followed when a family or an individual in such an estate is involved in serious breaches of the law or anti-social behaviour than it is to deal with someone who lives in a privately owned home in a private housing estate. In my opinion, it is wrong to evict a whole family because one individual is involved in anti-social behaviour. When a young child who is innocent in all of this is uprooted from his or her home and moved into a different community because of the behaviour of a parent or an older sibling, it might solve the issue for the community where the family was living but it does not solve the issue of the anti-social behaviour - it merely transfers it to the community where the family ends up living further down the road. I understand that when someone is evicted from a local authority house, it is the responsibility of the local authority or the HSE to ensure that person is adequately housed. Eviction does not solve the problem - it simply moves it to another location. I should also mention that if someone is involved in serious criminal activity or anti-social behaviour, it is an issue for the Garda to get involved in.

The question of succession rights is a difficult one. It is fair enough for a person who was living with his or her parents in the family home - a local authority house - before they passed away to be asked to meet his or her housing needs in the private market if that person's high income or good job gives him or her the financial means to do so. I do not have an issue with that. Such a person should not take up a local authority house that could accommodate a more needy individual or family. While I have no issue with such a policy being pursued, the circumstances I have outlined do not always apply. There are different circumstances in every scenario. We need to take all of them into account. I would like to give the example of an elderly couple with a small income. They have a granddaughter who stays with them but is not on the rent book. Perhaps they have taken her in because she does not have a relationship with her own parents. I have experience in this regard, having spoken to a young girl who was in such circumstances. When her grandmother passed away, she suddenly found herself homeless, in effect, even though she had lived in her grandmother's local authority house for a number of years. The problem was that she was not on the rent book. A degree of flexibility used to be available to local authorities in such cases. Perhaps some of them used it to a greater extent than others. We need to be very careful in this area because we do not want to see anyone being made homeless.

The issue of downsizing needs to be considered in the context of housing succession rights. I will give a personal example. My mother lives in a three-bedroom house at the moment. It is too big for her. She does not need a three-bedroom house. My father has passed away. My brother, my sister and I have moved out. There is nobody there. My mother's grandchildren stay overnight occasionally. A three-bedroom house is too difficult for her. Ill health is starting to becoming an issue for her. Climbing up and down stairs is becoming an issue for her. The local authority finds it difficult to facilitate people like my mother who wish to downsize. It does not have the variety of properties for people to downsize into. I will give another example. An elderly man with a disability who suddenly finds himself living alone in a three-bedroom or four-bedroom house, having raised his family in that family home over the decades, might want to downsize into a bungalow or a little two-bedroom apartment. The local authority does not have the type of dwelling into which he could downsize. I agree with the downsizing scheme, which has the potential to free up larger family units that are much needed. If the local authorities do not have the properties to enable people to downsize, the scheme will be made redundant. This must be to the fore when local authorities are undertaking house-building or refurbishment schemes. There is a need for integrated housing schemes that comprise a variety of units and are not confined to three-bedroom and four-bedroom houses. Such houses are no good to the single people who account for 50% of those on Cork City Council housing list.

This Bill will provide for the mandatory taking at source of moneys to go towards rent arrears. Most local authorities have very good schemes in place, whereby they sit down with individual tenants and come to an arrangement for a certain amount to be paid towards arrears. It is not mandatory. There has to be a certain degree of flexibility. In my experience, a person who is in rent arrears for some reason - he or she might have lost his or her job or fallen behind on a few bills - is usually dealt with compassionately when he or she goes into a local housing office to sit down with a housing official. Housing officials usually deal with individuals on the basis of their needs by assessing their income and expenditure and working out how much they should pay back. That is all well and good until something happens to that individual. There might be a death in the family, Christmas might be approaching, something in the home might need to be repaired or an additional amount of income might need to be spent on a piece of medical equipment. Housing officials seem to have no scope for dealing with that. They look at income and expenditure, but they do not take account of one-off costs that may arise. If tenants in such circumstances skip their rent payments for a week or two to pay for a doctor or hospital visit, they fall into arrears and start to encounter greater trouble.

There are bad landlords throughout the State. In my opinion and in my experience, having served on a local authority for almost 11 years, the local authorities are the biggest rogue landlords in the State. I have always said that. I firmly and truly believe it to be the case. Some of the housing stock owned by local authorities is not fit for people to be living in. Housing building inspectors inspect rental accommodation scheme properties to ensure they are of the standard required to allow the owner to become a landlord under the scheme. When the Minister of State was in Cork recently, she will have noted the scandalous condition of some of the housing in the city. There are people living in local authority homes without heating and hot water. This issue needs to be dealt with very quickly. The rental accommodation scheme itself is an absolute disaster waiting to happen. People are not being told at the time of taking up tenancies under the scheme that they are being taken off the local authority waiting list.

Despite what local authorities may tell the Minister of State or her officials, I guarantee they are not telling tenants when they take up RAS properties that they are effectively off the housing list. Although some of those RAS properties are in very poor condition, people are in such desperate need of housing that they accept them. Then they inform their local authorities of problems such as faulty heating, leaking windows and broken doors, which the landlord refuses to repair. Although the local authorities sanctioned the properties for RAS, they say it is not their responsibility.

There are major issues in housing and this Bill, while it is welcome, is only a small step in the right direction.

See this speech in context