Jan O'Sullivan (Limerick City, Labour) | Oireachtas source

First, I apologise, as I had to deal with two oral questions in the Dáil. After I had made my original presentation, I had to leave. However, I have read the presentations made.

I refer to Mr. O'Brien's comments.

The Chairman has dealt with this. These are Bills presented by me and Deputy Barry. They are not the committee's Bills. The committee has different views on our Bills and is simply holding hearings on our Bills. Any criticisms on the Bills should be directed towards myself and Deputy Barry rather than to everybody on the committee.

I want to raise a number of matters and to deal first with the student issue, which is not in my Bill. The Sinn Féin and the Fianna Fáil Bills were both published at the same time as my Bill and dealt with the student issue. My Bill is not comprehensive but I fully supported their Bills. As the Chairman has said, the Minister also told us the that issue of student accommodation is going to be dealt with by way of amendment to his Bill. To be completely frank about it, his Bill is much more likely to go through and to go through more quickly than any Bill of ours from the Opposition because it tends to take an awfully long time to get an Opposition Bill through the Houses of the Oireachtas. We will work with the Minister on that issue.

I thank the Threshold representatives for the ongoing information on the issues that come to their attention. They also gave us some data on the Minister's Bill, which is very helpful. In that context, in our earlier presentation, Deputy Casey raised the issue of data and the accuracy of the data we have. Perhaps Threshold may be in a position to help us because different organisations have different data on the reasons for people becoming homeless. The committee wants to gather as much accurate information of this sort as possible.

I specifically wanted to ask Threshold on the obligation to inform the Residential Tenancies Board, RTB, when a termination notice is being issued, something I understand it included in the documentation on the Minister's Bill. The RTB would then inform the tenant, so that the tenant would know that there were certain things he or she could do, including going to the local authority, which itself would also be informed. As far as I know, and perhaps Threshold may be able to clarify this, in the UK, and I am aware that Mr O'Brien referred to the UK, there is an obligation to notify the local authority well in advance when there is a risk of homelessness, so that the authority can respond appropriately rather than waiting until the tenant becomes homeless. If Threshold could give some clarity on that, that would be welcome.

On the issues that are of concern to landlords in particular, I do not know if the representatives heard my opening statement, which I submitted in writing to the committee as well. In that I spoke about the examples we got from the Library and Research Service relating to Europe, which are in its international comparative study on the private rented sector and which included the UK, incidentally, and I quoted the example of Germany where 41% of the housing stock is privately rented and that this is considered to be a secure, long-term option. In this regard, many of the measures in my Bill are around giving tenants security so that they can have a secure long-term option in the private rented sector, and I very much defend that in my Bill. I also said, however, that it is pointed out that the law benefits landlords as well as tenants. There are depreciation allowances, mortgage interest tax relief, deduction of maintenance costs and the possibility to deduct losses from the income tax base. These are all taxation measures and are not measures that would be in any Bill that would be presented to the housing committee.

We are accused of being anti-landlord, but while we recognise that there are issues for landlords as well, they are not in this Bill because this Bill is about protecting the rights of tenants and giving them security of tenure. In this very changing market that is in many ways catching up, where we had a collapse of the economy and houses not being built, I fully support the idea that the main thing we need is the publicly led construction of social and affordable houses. That is our policy. In the meantime, however, we have to protect tenants in the very fragile situation that they are in where they do not have any long-term security. It has to be looked at from their perspective, as well as from the landlord's perspective.

In that regard, on the point made by Ms McCormick about the deposit and the risk to the landlord who has paid big money for the property he or she is renting out, there is a risk to the tenant as well. If the tenant does not get his or her deposit back, he or she does not have a deposit for the next tenancy. There is a balance of risk there too. I certainly know of cases where the tenant did not get the deposit back from the letting agency where it said that it could not get the deposit back from landlord because the property had been sold. I know of cases where tenants had done nothing wrong to the property and did not get their deposit back. There is a balance there as well.

On the Constitution, in my presentation I put it in the context of the constitutional balance between property rights and the public good. In that regard, there is very little security for people in the private rented sector who, through no fault of their own, have to rely on that sector because there is not enough supply in the public sector at the moment. We could all go back to the reasons for that.

Those are the main points that I wanted to make. On the question of legal advice, the Chairman has dealt with that. My legal adviser was supposed to be here today but, unfortunately, could not be. We are trying to deal with the real situation that tenants find themselves in, and the measures in my Bill are fairly specific.

One other matter which I wish to refer to is the rent register. The Minister has said that he will bring forward proposals for a rent register. I agree with Threshold that it needs to be dwelling specific. We have it in our Bill that it will not disclose the identity of the landlord or the tenant of the dwelling. We are saying a prospective new tenant should know how much rent was charged previously on the property but that it would not contain the identity of the landlord or the tenant.