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

I thank the Department for getting on to me because I raised questions about the planning changes and the statutory instrument. I appreciate the call I got from the Department to go through it with me but I still requested that the Business Committee schedule a debate because the issues are important. I appreciate it agreed to that debate which will take place today. I will leave that aside. The key thing is it is a good idea but we need to ensure enforcement. If we do not have enforcement of standards we could have a problem and it could be abused. That is the key area. I will move on from that.

The Minister produced the numbers who had their housing needs met in 2017. He includes in those figures 17,916 HAP tenancies and 910 RAS tenancies.

The vast bulk of the people which the Minister, Deputy Murphy, claims to have met the housing needs of are in RAS and HAP. Does the Minister think he should acknowledge that is misleading? They have not had their housing needs met. An example I used in the Dáil, just one but I have loads, referred to Gemma, a mother of two, in college, working, and who got a HAP tenancy last February. In April the landlord pulled out of the agreement. Gemma found herself living in a hotel with a four year old and two year old. She stayed there until September when she could not bear it and her kids needed to go back to school. She is now living with her grandmother, her three uncles and her aunt. Eight people and four generations are living in a two bedroom house in Glasthule.

She is down in the Minister's figures as having her housing need met. It is nonsense. Stop doing that. It is misleading people. Is the Minister going to do that with HAPs? Stop describing HAPs as a solution which has met anybody's housing needs. It clearly has not. Supplementary to that, I refer to the housing list. People who get HAPs tenancies, which are precarious in the extreme, are taken off the housing list. That means that we are manipulating the housing list figures because the housing list will look as if it has gone down. However, it has not gone down because these people are in precarious HAP tenancies. I want the Minister to acknowledge that point. I believe that people who are in HAPs tenancies should stay on the list. I ask for that change.

Anything else is misleading as to what is going on. I am not saying some people. I heard the Taoiseach come back in response to me and say HAPs suits some people and some people would prefer to stay in HAPs. Fine, if people are happy in HAPs, happy days. However, for huge numbers of people it is precarious and it is not a permanent housing solution. What we need are permanent housing solutions, particularly for families with kids who have been in and out of rent allowance, RAS, and HAPs. This is happening to so many of these families. They just cannot take it anymore. I am dealing with families who have just gone into a hub in the last two days in Dún Laoghaire. They have been through several of these kind of tenancies and now they are being pushed to go and find HAPS again. They cannot take it anymore, their kids cannot take it anymore. They are going back into another form of precarious housing rather than a permanent housing solution which means a council house. I would like the Minister to comment on that.

Also, will the Minister clarify what exactly people are entitled to in terms of HAPs in areas where the average rents, as is the case in Dún Laoghaire and South Dublin, exceed the current HAP limits? People feel like banging their head against the wall when they go into the council and they are faced with an eviction. I have three new evictions in my office this week coming into force at the end of the month. They are faced with homelessness, all of them families and they are told to go find HAPs. What are people supposed to do? There is nothing. Then they have to fight with the council to see if the HAPS limit can be extended up, and be told that it cannot be extended because that is too far. People have to be offered a solution when they go into the council as to what they are supposed to do in these situations or we need to do something to stop the flow into homelessness, that is their eviction.

It has to be one or the other. If people come into my office, or the Minister's office or whatever, and say they are going to be evicted on 31 January, they need to be offered something. What is the Minister proposing to offer, given that rents in many areas, and certainly in mine, exceed the HAP limits?