Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for his remarks. I extend my thanks and those of my party to the members of the working group, including the departmental officials in their advisory capacity. The report is significant. It will be seen as significant as the original report on pyrite and defective blocks in terms of giving us a solid grounding for the scheme, which we all hope comes soon.

I acknowledge three organisations. The Apartment Owners Network represents homeowners campaigning on this and many other issues with regard to reform of the sector. The Construction Defects Alliance, especially since 2018 and especially in the run-up to the general election of 2020, has put a political focus on this issue and ensured it found its way into the programme for Government. The more recently established Not Our Fault 100% redress campaign emerged out of a number of specific developments and has dovetailed very well with the two other groups. All three are co-operating well and more will emerge in time.

I want to spend my time talking about the scheme rather than the report. This is not in any way to sideline its importance. Really we are now at the stage where we have to ensure we get the scheme right. From our party's point of view, we want to work with the Minister in a constructive and detailed way. While some of the remarks I will make are critical, it is because I want to ensure, as we go through the process the Minister has outlined, that we do it in a collaborative way in the best interests of all those we represent who are today living with significant structural defects.

The scheme has to follow the principles of the original pyrite remediation scheme. It has to provide 100% redress in the same way the original scheme did. This is only just and fair. It is the only right way for things to proceed. It has to be an end-to-end scheme. I appeal to the Minister not to repeat the mistakes of the grant-led scheme that exists and the revised scheme for defective blocks. I do not think that was ever the right approach, certainly with the benefit of hindsight. It would be a particularly inappropriate approach for multi-unit developments. Individual grants, either to homeowners, categories of homeowners or owners' management companies, would not be appropriate to address the issues involved. It has to be done through owners' management companies and there is no doubt about this. I have long supported the proposal of the Construction Defects Alliance for an agency to manage the scheme. Not only should this agency be responsible for the inspection, approval and contracting out of the works, it should also have the capacity to project manage in a way that voluntary directors of an owners' management company simply cannot or will not.

To avoid any confusion, and again I am open to amending my views on this, I have never argued that the 2014 legislation underpinning the Pyrite Resolution Board is sufficient for dealing with this. My point is we need a stand-alone agency. My only concern with establishing a new agency is that the recruitment of staff and other matters will take time. I have always been of the view that new underpinning legislation for a new scheme is required. The Minister has a choice to make and I urge him to explore it. If the Minister accepts the need for a stand-alone agency, should a new one be created or should the remit of the existing agency be expanded? This could be done with new underpinning legislation to shift the remit beyond pyrite resolution and into wider defects resolution. Ultimately, I do not mind what the mechanism is so long as it is established quickly and does the job that is required.

With respect to the legislation, we want to work with the Minister but I will be critical on this point. There was enormous frustration in the committee at the lack of even a small amount of time to do adequate legislative scrutiny and deal not with amendments drafted by us but amendments initiated by homeowners on the enhanced defective block scheme. It was not an ideal process. Notwithstanding the difficulty the Minister put us in with the Bill, the accelerated pre-legislative scrutiny, as I like to call it - other members of the committee call it something else - had a real value. The three sessions we had were enormously important.

Nobody wants to delay the legislation, especially not those of us on this side of the House who, like the Minister, have been campaigning on this for a very long time. There is a difference between delaying and giving legislation adequate time. I appeal to the Minister not to make the mistakes that were made with the defective blocks Bill. Homeowners are not happy with the Bill and the Minister knows this, whatever about what people say on the floor of the Dáil. When the scheme eventually opens, many of the concerns and issues homeowners asked us to raise in the House will become apparent. Therefore, if we are to take the Minister at his word, we will get adequate time to scrutinise legislation. We will also get adequate time to table amendments if homeowners, in particular their representative groups, ask us to do so, as they did with regard to the defective blocks, to ensure we have cross-party support. It would be absolutely brilliant if this work had the unanimous support of Members of the Oireachtas. It would give homeowners incredible confidence in the scheme in a way that is currently not the case with regard to defective blocks.

There is a genuine problem with the funding. Even if we get a scheme up and running next year, there is no financial provision. There was a small uplift in the combined funding for defective blocks and pyrite. It is difficult to see this funding extending either to the emergency measures the Minister spoke about, which I welcome, or to applicants and drawdown for a remediation scheme. Therefore, there will need to be additional provision next year not just for this but also for defective blocks if it is to be done properly.

I have set out my views in a letter to the Minister. Again, these are our views at the start of the discussion and I am open to better ways of doing it. We need to be very clear about who gets full remediation and where can the State recoup some of the costs. My strong view is homeowners for whom the property is their principal private residence, social housing landlords, whether local authorities or approved housing bodies, and single property landlords with one property should all be included in the scheme for 100% redress through the owners' management companies. There is a big challenge in the scheme with multi-unit landlords, especially institutional landlords in places such as Beacon South Quarter. To allow the scheme to happen quickly, upfront 100% funding should be provided through the agency. Multiple unit landlords should have to pay for remediation. This should be recouped through the agency and the Department. If not, a charge should be placed on the property. This would allow ease in getting the works done and ensure landlords, particularly institutional landlords who can pay, and in some cases already have paid, for remediation, do so.

At a later stage there will be a need to return to the wider issue of the industry's contribution to this. All I would ask is for the Minister to look at the attempt of his predecessor Phil Hogan to establish a levy. He should publish some of the information from that time and share it with the Oireachtas committee. Let us have a conversation about what is the best way to ensure that industry, especially profitable sectors of the industry in areas that played a role in this, can contribute to the ultimate cost. As we all know, this will be multi-annual, it will be multibillion and the taxpayer should not have to foot the full bill.

I welcome what the Minister said about a risk-based approach, retrospection, interim measures and emergency funding, although the proof will be in the pudding. I would like the Minister to put more focus on the role of the National Asset Management Agency, NAMA, and what the State can do with respect of NAMA's often very negative role in cases where there are defects. The Minister has met the insurance industry but more needs to be done on its role as we move forward. The timeline is crucial and I have made this point to the Minister previously. More than one year ago he announced the enhanced defective blocks scheme.

I accept these things cannot happen overnight, but we still do not know when the enhanced scheme will open and whether it will it be early or mid-next year. We do not know how long it will take to process applications and, ultimately, we do not know when families in Donegal, Mayo, Clare and Limerick will be able to draw down that much-needed funding. That is an exceptionally long time. I suspect the first drawdown under the new scheme is likely to be in the latter end of next year. I hope I am wrong, and I will stand corrected if I am, but that would be two years from the announcement of the scheme before people can access it. That is too long for families affected by defective blocks as much as it is too long for families in this other situation.

We would like to hear the new year updates on the wider reform of building control and consumer protection, which is in the programme for Government. I do not have time to go into it today, but the one thing I would say is that it was very disappointing to read a story last weekend in the Business Postabout a change in the national building control and market surveillance office's report, from the initial to final draft, on defective blocks in Donegal. The lines that were removed are very important. We should all accept that building control is the poor cousin of our planning regime. It is under-resourced, undertrained and understaffed, which is no criticism of the officials there. We have to get that right and improve. Let us be honest and accept the criticism and collectively work together to improve the situation and ensure the kind of scandal, which we will have to spend billions of euro to fix, never happens again.

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