Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 2 June 2016

Committee on Housing and Homelessness

Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government

10:30 am

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

I welcome that the Minister now acknowledges this is an emergency. It is a word I found it difficult to get the previous Government to say and that has not helped in preventing this tsunami of homelessness from developing. Before I ask the Minister about the housing targets and how he envisages that issue being resolved, does he agree with me that if this is an emergency, the first thing we need to stop is more people becoming homeless? People think this could not get any worse but it could. I was surprised that in his submission, the Minister did not mention preventing people from becoming homeless and the issue of the private rented sector. On page 27 of the programme for Government, it is stated there will be a review of the current regulatory regime for the private sector. Does this include serious consideration of the introduction of real rent controls? Members are aware there has been an increase in rent supplement and while I will not dwell on it, it is not enough and will not necessarily work. However, in the case of those who are struggling but who are not necessarily in receipt of rent supplement, rents must come down but at the least should be prevented from rising further. Does the Minister agree they must be linked to the consumer price index? This measure has been called for by all the homeless agencies that appeared before the committee in recent weeks, including Focus Ireland, Simon and so on. All the non-governmental organisations, NGOs, are calling for it and the Minister must indicate whether he is willing to do this.

Second, does the Minister support security of tenure for all tenants in Ireland to prevent people from becoming homeless, including those who have been told by an ordinary landlord that the property must be sold? This is now the most common method being used to evict somebody, often to jack up the rent rather than to sell the property. In some cases it is to sell the property because the prices are increasing. What will the Minister do in legislative terms, because I believe these two measures are two key items of emergency legislation that are needed?

On the Minister's general philosophy on resolving this housing emergency, I am somewhat disturbed that the Minister keeps invoking the term "housing market". He stated he would like to get back to a normalised housing market again and spoke of the housing market. When he appeared before this committee, Peter McVerry took issue with that, as do I, because we should not have a housing market; we should have a housing system. One reason we have come to this sorry pass is because we allowed housing to become a commodity for speculation rather than seeking to house people. On foot of his presentation today, I still am unclear as to what level of public housing the Minister favours because most of the reliance still appears to be in the private sector. For example, the Minister stated there is enough zoned land around Dublin. I have brought out this issue in questions to the National Asset Management Agency, NAMA, and to others. While NAMA in reality has enough land zoned as residential land to house everyone on the housing waiting list, it cannot do that because of its brief. However, if there already is enough land zoned, planning is not the problem. Does the Minister agree the private developers are holding off? They are hoarding land and are holding back on building until prices rise again.

It is as though they need to be enticed back into the market as if they were on strike and need to be given more of the concessions for which they are looking.

The document refers to a housing target of 25,000 units per year, but that will only deal with new population growth. It would not deal with everyone on housing waiting lists. What type of units would they be? What percentage does the Minister think should be public housing? If the figure is 10%, 20% or 30%, it would take 56, 38 and 18 years, respectively, to clear the housing lists. The housing crisis would never be resolved based on those figures. The Minister may want a higher percentage, but they are the figures he indicated in the presentation.

The document lists Part V, NAMA and the NTMA as being the things that the last Government did which the Minister backs. Last year, half of the houses that were built under Part V were one-off houses. We got very little from Part V. The Government reduced the percentage to 10%. Therefore, there will be even fewer units provided than was previously the case. NAMA has a target of 20,000 new houses, but 2,000 of those would be social housing based on the Part V rate of 10%.

The Minister referred to Activate Capital, representatives of which came before the committee recently. I am somewhat disturbed about the manner in which it is using Anglo Irish Bank and Maple 10 developers, which are receiving large subsidies from the fund. Former bankers are at the head of the fund. Nothing is emerging from the funding of €500 million from the taxpayer - the money came from the pensions reserve fund - which is intended to provide social housing. No more than 10%, as far as I can see, will be provided.

I refer to the fiscal rules, which have been a key subject of debate in the committee. The Ireland Strategic Investment Fund totals €5.4 billion. NAMA has about €2.4 billion left in its cash reserves. If a political decision was taken to change its brief and compel it to build social and affordable housing, we could resolve the housing crisis. I put this to the Minister when I met him and he said, quite rightly, that if NAMA's brief was changed the process would not be off-balance-sheet. This is the elusive model we have all sought.

Recently, three top civil servants came before the committee and I asked them to show me an off-balance sheet model that worked anywhere in Europe. There was a vague mention of something in France, which everybody here heard. It is now virtually impossible to do anything off-balance sheet if one wants to comply with EU rules, because they are constantly being redefined, such as PPPs and so on.

There are only two ways around this issue. Either we breach the rules in order to house people who need it and tell Europe we cannot abide by the rules because we have to house people, or we have to raise commensurate revenue to pay for the housing that we build. I would be very sceptical that could be done based on a cost rental model because very high rents would have to be charged, but I remain to be convinced. We need to have higher eligibility criteria for social housing. This would increase rental yields because tenants would pay higher rents based on the differential rent scheme as their income would be higher.

Could the Minister consider increasing the tax on wealth in this country? We have seen data on how the top 250 wealthiest people in the country increased their wealth by 3% last year. The Minister's presentation states that nobody is arguing that everything that is built should be public housing. I would argue that we need to redefine what public housing is. It seems to me that the term "social housing" has become a term of stigma and a problematic term because it suggests that people have social problems. They may not necessarily have social problems at all.

We need to define what we mean by public housing.

The Minister said we cannot go back to the mistakes of the past. Every time, we hear this, somebody invokes Ballymun or Knocknaheeny, but what about Crumlin and all the other housing estates built by local authorities in this country through the decades that are not huge areas of deprivation or problematic and in which many of us were reared? We are also stigmatising social housing by constantly invoking these examples. There are many good examples of public housing in this country. I am not referring to the Minister. This has been an issue in the meeting.

The Minister said he thinks public housing must be mixed in with private housing. This is a topic we need to consider. How much is the Minister talking about? If there are 30 public housing units in a private housing estate and another 40 here, to get 100,000 families off the waiting list, we would need to build one million houses. If 10% is going to be social or public housing, we cannot house 100,000 families. It must be more than that. I do not see anything wrong with local authority house building if we have proper facilities, green spaces, shops and properly planned schools. The particular problem was that in many estates, people were left bereft and isolated eight miles from their base. We would need 3,000 estates of 30 to 40 houses if we are going to then solve the housing waiting list. There must be a much bigger social proportion of social housing than 10% or 15%. The Minister needs to clarify what he thinks that would be.

In respect of learning the lessons of the past, I do not have time to go into it but what were those lessons? I think the Minister is in danger of repeating some of them. Nine tax breaks for developers are listed in the programme for a partnership Government. Will the Minister implement those nine tax breaks? All the tax breaks provided in the past led to very wealthy people siphoning off all the wealth at the top. All the surveys show that. Even though it increased housing supply, it did not increase affordable housing so the Minister needs to stop constantly talking about increasing supply of all types of housing because it must be affordable housing. It seems that all the emphasis is still on getting the builders to build without any reference to what would be affordable.

Will the Minister give funds to local authorities? He says he wants them to draw up plans, but based on my experience, my local authority does not have the funds to build.

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