Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I must comment on my disappointment that the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform has left, given that the Government earlier, on the confidence motion, spent a lot of its time claiming rather disingenuously that members of the Opposition were not here. We will see to what extent anybody really bought that, but it was part of a concerted effort to prevent the real, substantial discussion as to what is actually happening in a key area of public investment to solve the housing crisis in this country, which is blighting the lives of so many people.

The tabling of a confidence motion, when originally there was a no confidence motion, allowed the Government to dominate and to minimise the ability of the Opposition to put forward its case. That is part of the parliamentary game-playing that goes on in here. Then we have a debate which is dealing with substance around what is actually being spent by different Departments or what was not spent from what was supposed to be spent by Departments. This debate, helpfully for the Government, will be completely ignored by the media. There are virtually no Deputies here for the discussion on what was spent and not spent. However, when you examine the money that was spent and was not spent, you learn certain things that provide slightly more tangible evidence for the various claims and counter-claims that are being made about Government policy and particularly in the area of housing.

There is a startling figure on carryover of expenditure which is money that was allocated to be spent but was not spent. By far the biggest figure, which does not tell the whole story, is that for the housing Department. It is €340 million that will be carried over to next year because it was not spent. It is part of a bigger figure of €700 million. The Minister of State may be able to illuminate this but I think the maximum carryover figure can only be 10% of the original allocation, so this is not the full picture of what was not spent because you are only allowed to carry over the maximum amount. However, €340 million is a huge amount and there was also other money that was not spent on housing. I would argue that much of the money we spent on housing was wasteful expenditure that does not help to deal with the housing crisis. It is a shocking fact that the Government cannot spend €700 million in the teeth of an absolutely extraordinary housing crisis.

You can look at the figures and see this but, again, this is the material that does not really get out there. However, people, you might call them the nerds but they are very useful nerds, like Mr. Mel Reynolds the housing commentator puts figures together each year and the actual housing figures are quite telling. It explains why all this money was not spent. Mel Reynolds does not simply look at what the Government claims it will build or spend in terms of housing but at what is actually happening to the housing stock and where there is more public housing at the end of the year than there was at the beginning because that would actually tell you something.

Here is a fact: in 2017 Dublin City Council had 24,990 local authority houses. Five years later, it had 24,722. That is minus 268 after all the money that was spent or not spent, and after all the claims that it was going to ramp up the investment in public housing, Dublin City Council has 268 fewer local authority houses than it had five years ago. It is quite extraordinary. Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council has done slightly better. It gained 25 local authority houses in five years. Fingal County Council has gained 780. That sounds a lot better when you are dealing with a minus figure or 35 but when you are dealing with thousands and thousands of families on a housing list, that is pretty disastrous too. South Dublin County Council has 452 additional after five years in the epicentre of the housing crisis.

I have mentioned here before that the figure for additional local authority houses built by Dublin City Council in the first two quarters of this year was zero; Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council was zero; Fingal County Council was zero; and South Dublin County Council was zero. How does the Government manage to claim that it is going to deliver 9,000 social houses and a few thousand additional affordable houses when this is the actuality of what is happening? The total number of new local authority houses and approved housing body houses is 1,632 in the first six months of this year. How does it manage to claim that it is nearly or not far off meeting its targets? It has not spent the money and these are the actual figures. It is because it delivers the social houses that the State has not built itself by lease or by HAP tenancies. That is an enormous waste of money.

Take the biggest landlord in the country, IRES REIT. A recent study showed that it makes an average of 50% profit on every single tenant, on rents that are through the roof. A huge amount of that is being paid by the taxpayer in HAP, RAS and leasing payments to these landlords who are seeing absolutely extraordinary increases in their profits. You can say the same for Cairn Homes. Its profit margins jumped by 167% in the last year. It is the biggest owner of zoned building land in Dublin city. These are extraordinary profits but we end up paying for much of that because we will buy the affordable housing from them. That is why, of course, we voted against the Government’s Affordable Housing Bill because it explicitly linked the price of affordable housing to market prices. It said it would be benchmarked against market prices. There would be something of a discount but market prices that are manipulated upwards to astronomical levels by the likes of Cairn Homes where we have more than 70,000 planning permissions for apartments but only 5,000 apartments being delivered each year in the last number of years. These people drip-feed construction so that prices stay high, rents stay high and then the State, the tenant or the house buyers pay through the nose because these people are manipulating the entire situation.

When it comes to the actual allocation for the State to do the cost-effective thing, which is to build its own housing on its own land and cut out the profit margins of the IRES REITs and Cairn Homes, there is a complete failure to deliver or to spend the money that was allocated to do that. The Government is the mouthpiece for these very same people and says that it is not because of all that we have a housing crisis. No, it is because someone objected somewhere to a housing development. We have tens of thousands of planning permissions that are not being commenced by these people, so what we will do is make it easier for the developers to get rezoned land or to get planning permission in order that they can get even more land assets and control even more of the market to rob even more money from tenants, house buyers and from the public purse in appropriation. It would make you sick.

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