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

I have a couple of points for Ms McCormick and Mr. O'Brien. I am genuinely not anti-landlord. I am probably one of the few Deputies living in the private rental sector who likes living there. In most of the debates here and in most of my public commentary, we acknowledge that the vast majority of landlords are compliant and provide a good service. We want to see a restructured private rental sector in the future. That would be good for tenants because it would give them security of rent and tenure and also good for the landlords who make that investment because they could make a fair return. I repeatedly say that publicly and here as well.

I accept the sincerity of the witnesses' points and I ask them to at least consider the sincerity of ours. Ours is not a political agenda. We have two problems. We have far too many accidental landlords who got into landlordism as a passive investment but it is not a passive investment, it is an active one. Many people took on substantial liabilities when they got into that situation. I accept that people who bought a single investment property at the height of the boom are now in difficult financial circumstances. That is a real social and economic problem. Our other problem is that rents are rising far too high for working families - not for social housing tenants and I will come to that in a second.

Looking at the RTB rental index published yesterday, it was 7.8% in Dublin in the last 12 months and 7.1% overall. People's wages have not gone up that much. I accept that a category of landlords is unable to make a return of any kind. The flip side of that is a growing number of families, particularly working families, cannot afford the asking rents of €1,800 to €2,000 to €2,200. They are not exceptional cases, they are standard. We have to have a conversation at some point where, instead of us butting heads on some of the substantive issues, we have to be able to sit down and work out how we fix some of that. We are not going to agree on it all but how do we fix some of it?

Ms McCormick and Mr. O'Brien are here because those of us on the committee take our job seriously. We are open to being persuaded that we deal with some of the points raised in the detail of how the legislation is drafted, and I think we can do that, or we are open to being convinced that this is the wrong thing to do or that there are other things that could be put in, either now or in the next Bill. The witnesses should not think that we invite them in here and do not listen. We genuinely do and I am going to go through a couple of the points where I agree with them. I want to highlight first, however, some of the points where I do not necessarily disagree but I do take a slightly different view.

Part of the problem with our public debate is that we think of landlords as a homogenous group and they are not. There are single property landlords who have properties from before the boom and who do not have mortgages, or do not have significant mortgages, and they are making significant profit. A large number of landlords, accidental and deliberate, bought properties during the boom and they are the people that the witnesses were talking about. In many instances, they are making a loss on their rental properties and I accept that. Some of them are in mortgage difficulty with their primary residences as well. We also have many professional landlords, who are medium-sized operators, who are making a profit.

The witnesses are right, and Deputy Barry and I raise this regularly, the new institutional investors - the real estate investment trust, REITs, and the capital funds - are getting disproportionate treatment in respect of tax. They have no tax on the rent roll, no tax on capital gains and, if they are structured properly, from their point of view, no dividend withholding tax. The playing field is not level and there is no dispute on that. Many of us spend much time arguing against all of that because it creates all sorts of difficulties.

There is a heavy level of State subsidy going into the rental sector. I refer, for example, to tax relief on the interest portions of mortgages. That is a significant cost lost to the State annually. It is also increasing - it increased from the last budget to this one and it will increase again. The Government wants to restore it to 100% and it is currently available at 100% to people on the housing assistant payment, HAP. I am not saying that to offset the difficulties that the witnesses outlined. All I am saying is that it is legitimate, as a landlord representative organisation, to raise local property tax, LPT, and other rising costs but there are also increasing tax deductions available. Over 100,000 rental tenancies are subsidised by the State, some at very increasing costs. Homeless HAP is now paying out €1,800 to €1,900 for families. Standard HAP is close to the market rent in large parts of Dublin. It is important that we put all of those facts out there. There is much subsidising of the private rental sector and that has to be acknowledged.

On short-term lets, I will send the document to the witnesses to let them know what we are proposing because this committee put much work and spent a lot of time looking at this issue. We think the Minister is moving in this direction. We are not proposing to close down short-term letting and the regulatory regime that we unanimously agreed is less onerous than Barcelona, Madrid and New York. It is closer to what exists in London. We think it is a fair set of proposals. Airbnb has a particular business model and an aggressive lobbying strategy and that is its right. If the witnesses look at our proposals, they will see that they are different from what they may have read in the newspapers. They are certainly not restrictive in any way. I agree with the witnesses that we need training for landlords. If we think about it, a taxi driver has more regulatory and training requirements before they can get into a taxi and drive somebody around. The home I live in as a tenant, however, has very little in respect of professional support and training requirements for landlords.

I would therefore be strongly in support of that and of additional resourcing through the RTB and to representative organisations to help landlords to professionalise. I think Threshold has been calling for this for years, as have others. I agree with Ms McCormick about the now confusing relationship between HAP, RAS and long-term leasing. An increasing number of RAS landlords are exiting the scheme completely because of what they see as disadvantageous treatment. Many of us have raised this in the Dáil, in committee and with the Department privately to see how we might resolve it. Again, we do not always disagree with the representatives of property owners but there are areas where we are in agreement.

One of the points the RTB made very clearly was that it is not in favour of criminal sanctions. It thinks it is the wrong route to take and wants a civil sanction regime. The RTB made the point very clearly that it wants to be able to distinguish between an administrative error or genuine mistake and vexatious breaches of the rules. This is why I think Mr. Elliott's point about the sliding scale of sanctions is absolutely right. It is not the case, and it would be wrong of us as a committee to suggest, that if someone makes a small error, he or she is liable for a €30,000 fine. That is not the intention of the Bill, and we will certainly not suggest that when we get into the detail of it. However, the purpose of enforcement is to ensure that, no matter how many people breach the rules, the sanction for doing so is too great for them even to think about it. This is not only beneficial to the tenant; it is actually beneficial to the vast majority of landlords, who are trying to do a good job. If 1%, 5% or 10% of landlords break all the rules and undercut the law-abiding landlords, it is not good for the landlords either. I therefore encourage the Irish Property Owners Association to consider that some of this regulation, if done right, will actually be beneficial to the members it represents because it levels the playing field between that percentage of landlords, whatever it is - we do not know - who break the rules and those who abide by the law.

I wish to make just a few quick points before we finish.