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

That was my intention, as I mentioned at the outset. I just wanted to mention this in passing. My question is: when we will see the fire safety review? I understand the new regulations were agreed at the beginning of this year. When exactly are we going to see them?

On the issue of homelessness, I would like to pick up on Senator Murnane O'Connor's point. Before getting into specifics, we need a change of attitude. We need to accept at this point that we have let every single homeless person down. We have to start with that. I know where the Senator is coming from when she says some of these hubs are very good but no hub, no hotel and no emergency accommodation is good from the point of view of the people in it. Their being homeless means we have failed them and it is not good. There needs to be an attitude change from the very top right the way down through everybody engaging with the homeless. People should not be expected to be grateful for getting slightly better emergency accommodation. That attitude exists. We have failed everybody who is homeless. We should recognise these are human beings and the first thing we should do is apologise to them and then listen to them. We should not have arbitrary self-imposed targets such as getting people out of hotels by a certain date, getting them into hubs, etc. Some people would rather be in a hotel near their children's school than be sent to the best hub in the world 15 km away. Other people might want to be in the hub rather than the hotel. The key is to start with the human beings, the individuals, rather than having arbitrary self-imposed schemes.

The second group of people to whom I would urge the Minister to talk is the staff in the housing departments whose morale is on the floor. These are the people who have to take the flak for the failure of successive governments. The Minister needs to really listen to them and to ask what it is they think would help matters. I would start with the human beings affected by the crisis and move on to those working on the front line.

On the July issue, in my area in particular, and this may be true elsewhere, I do not want to keep hearing of people being told they are being put out of hotels because the local authority needs to clear everybody out and that they will be put in a hub in town, whether they like it or not. That should not happen. I have had to fight and go to the Department on this. Bob Jordan has been very helpful. We need to start with what is best for the children and for the families and that may mean staying in a hotel until something better can be found. Nobody should be in a hotel or in a hub, but the point is that we need flexibility based on humanity.

On vacant properties, I really urge the Minister to look at this issue and to conduct an audit. We need staff to go out to look for these vacant properties. Let us take the Robin Hill apartments, an example I highlighted before. These should never have been sold by NAMA to Cerberus. There are 15 empty apartments there now. Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council tried to get them a year ago and was refused. These apartments are empty. Can we have them please? Can we have action to get those apartments and can we please tell Cerberus, which has made a fortune out of this, that it is not to evict anybody? We cannot allow them evict anybody, which is what it is currently trying to do because some of those people evicted from Robin Hill at the end of July will then be down to Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council looking for emergency accommodation. That is the reality. Either we stop those evictions or those people will be down to the county council.

More generally, can we have an audit of empty properties in every area and the resources provided to achieve this? We need to approach the owners of every one of these empty properties and the councils need to look to acquire them in some shape or from for the purpose of social housing.

Of Rebuilding Ireland's target of providing 110,000 to 120,000 social housing units of all sorts by 2021, approximately two-thirds is through HAPs. Does the Minister now accept this is simply not going to happen? Some of it will happen. For two-thirds of the social housing strategy to depend on HAPs, however, when this scheme is self-evidently failing in a number of areas, has to be revised. I am not saying some degree of HAPs cannot work but there are reports that in many areas landlords cannot be persuaded to sign up. Worse still, many landlords are pulling out of the HAPs arrangement and making people who thought that they were socially-housed homeless.

There has to be some recognition that this is not a viable strategy. The extent to which the social housing strategy depends on the scheme has to be scaled down and replaced with something better.

In so far as the Minister is persisting with housing assistant payments I have a request for every local authority. We do not have place finders in Dún Laoghaire. We are dependent on the offices down town. Under the current set-up the responsibility for families who are in homeless accommodation is on the council. The council must help them to find a rental property rather than someone who is trying to get the children to school from some hub or hotel, especially when that person is also being told to find their own HAP arrangements. It is absolutely scandalous.

I asked officials in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council whether they know about the place finders unit. They did not even know about it. There is no place finders unit in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council. They refer us to town and they do not even know what is going on in the place finders unit in town. It is crazy that senior housing officials in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council barely know what the service is. I appeal to the Minister on that point.

Another question on housing assistance payments relates to the projection. I appeal to the Minister to scale it down and replace it with something else. In so far as the Minister intends to persist with it, what is he going to do with the lack of security on HAP that is emerging? Is the Minister going to revisit the nature of the HAP arrangements in order that there is some security to them? Otherwise, they do not represent a form of social housing. It is not social housing if a person can be turfed out a year from now.

The Minister mentioned Cherrywood and affordable rental schemes and so on. Currently, we are only going to get 10% of Cherrywood for this. The Minister said it is one of the biggest residential developments happening anywhere in the country. If we got a higher proportion, we could, with that one development, almost solve the housing crisis in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council. However, we are only getting 10%, even though under the original strategic development zone we were supposed to get 20%. Can the Minister explain what we are going to do about that? Can we please at least insist that we get the 20% level that was in the SDZ?

Will the Minister please ask NAMA about it too? NAMA has property there that is not included in the Hines element. Will the Minister ask NAMA to provide its land up there for social housing? We do not know the status of Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council land in the Cherrywood development. Can we ask that Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council also provide social housing on the council part of the land in Cherrywood? That would significantly increase the proportion of social housing.

I wish to ask about the contrast between the Government's stated policy commitment to social mix and other arrangements. Why is it that on private land – some of it used to be public, but we sold it – we are only asking for 10%? This means the social mix amounts to 90% and 10% is for social housing. However, on public land the Government appears to be proposing 33% for social housing and 66% for various forms of private housing. I do not agree with any public land being privatised, as the Government is proposing. Anyway, at least for the sake of consistency, if the Government believes in social mix, then surely the same percentage should apply to private land. Why is the social mix different on public land and private land? I am asking the question seriously. If there was consistency within the Government policy - which I somewhat disagree with - the proportion of social housing in overall residential developments would significantly ramp up. Will the Minister respond to those questions?

Finally, threshold limits on eligibility for social housing must be revised immediately because people are getting knocked off the list simply for doing some extra shifts. Their income would not be anywhere close to allowing them to be able to rent or buy but they are being knocked off housing lists. Can that be reviewed urgently? Can the Minister issue an instruction to local authorities to stop taking people off the list now until we have revised those limits? This is vital because people are being thrown off the list as we speak.