Ruth Coppinger (Dublin West, Anti-Austerity Alliance) | Oireachtas source

-----when his party was in power and he has been in this Ministry. My first question is why the local authority housing targets are so low in the first place. The Social Housing Strategy 2020 has a target of 35,000 new units from 2015 to 2020, but only 11,200 are to be new social housing units to be built or acquired by councils or housing associations. If that is broken down, given there are roughly 100,000 families on the housing list, only one in ten would be catered for by the acquisition or building of a social housing unit, based on those targets. The rest of the 35,000 new units were to be 11,000 leases, 2,300 refurbishments of voids and 9,000 units bought or leased under Part V, although that is dependent on the private sector building the units in order for them to be acquired. The Minister can see how, with a continuation of this policy, the social housing lists are never going to be impacted upon in the way that is needed.

Another issue that arises in regard to the Minister's document is that the targets are proportionately lowest in the areas worst affected by homelessness. While Dublin is not the only place affected, it is at the epicentre of this tsunami. To take the four Dublin local authority areas, there were 22,000 on Dublin City Council's housing list in December but what the Minister is talking about would only have an impact on 21% of that list. In the case of Fingal, the figure is would be 23%. All of the other areas have higher outcomes, so the Minister can see how targeted intervention in the worst affected areas is just not happening.

The other question is on the breakdown of social housing. The Minister said that the share of social housing as a percentage of households will increase significantly under his strategy. However, last year - the first year of the strategy - there was only a maximum net increase of 268 genuinely new social housing units across all the schemes. I want to break this down. The Minister referred to 13,000 units in respect of which sets of keys were delivered.

Of that figure, 2,696 are renovated voids, 125 have been regenerated, 1,096 result from local authorities acquiring second hand homes, 64 are new local authority completions, including from Part V developers, and 401 have been built or bought by housing associations. Of the figure of 33,000, only 1,561 are new permanent social housing units provided by local authorities or housing agencies. Some 8,933 units are rented or leased from landlords or developers. We have had complete reliance on the private sector. Will the Minister at least admit, now that he is leaving his post, that this was an error?

Why is the capital spend in this area so low? The Minister has continued to talk in the Dáil about the money that has been thrown at this issue. The money that has been thrown at it is now lower, with it being a third of what it was in 2008. We have a housing crisis and the money allocated to address it must be increased. Some €11 billion has been taken out of the allocation for housing since the recession began. It must be put back into if we are to solve the housing crisis.

The Minister mentioned those people who say we need loads more money to provide social houses; he was probably referring to the people on the left. He also said the money has to come from somewhere else and he asked if it is to come from the allocation for health or education. The answer is "No", it is not. It could come from the National Asset Management Agency, NAMA, which has €3 billion in its cash reserves. Delegates from NAMA will appear before the committee, so I do not want to focus on NAMA but there is money in its cash reserves and the Government could have ordered NAMA to change its remit at any time. The Minister could also consider taxing wealth in this country. That is the other place in this respect. The fiscal space the Minister has talked about cannot resolve the housing crisis or the other issues in health and education. It is too small. The Minister needs to get more wealth and use it for the vast majority in society but he has not been willing to do that. The Minister mentioned the percentage of social housing in Ireland has always been very low but in the 1960s it was almost 20%, so it was not always low.

On the private rented sector, the Minister mentioned today and previously in the Dáil that he is powerless in the face of the Constitution to keep people in their homes. The legal advice he got, I assume from the Attorney General, stating that people could not be kept in their homes if a property is being sold should be published because it has been disputed by others. The Minister mentioned Mr. Justice Edmund Honohan and, hopefully, he will appear before the committee. We are meant to have a session on legal issues that need to be examined to resolve the housing issue.

The Minister did not enact most of the claimed improvements in the Residential Tenancies (Amendment) Act yet. For example, the provision relating to the statutory declaration landlords are required to provide if they intend to sell a property has not yet been enacted. Perhaps the Minister suddenly introduced a ministerial order to that effect, but it was not enacted when I last checked. The only other element to which the Minister has pointed is the two-year lease. Will he acknowledge that, given that rents will increase by 10% this year, the provision has not worked? The two-year lease provision simply doubled the increase that landlords imposed.