Eoghan Murphy (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Ó Broin. I am just taking a final note of his questions. I thank him for relaying that information to me from the school students. I could not find a Twitter handle to tweet them. Perhaps they are not on Twitter. I have invited students into the Department from time to time to present on various projects they have done. I am happy to have these students come in and talk through their experiences and their perspective. A number of schools and students have corresponded with me on the crisis in housing and homelessness. It is great to see that level of engagement which demonstrates that civic lessons in schools are touching on the most important issues we face in society today. I am always happy to get correspondence and to engage with students.

Deputy Ó Broin made some political points at the beginning and I will address those. Rebuilding Ireland is a work in progress. It is not something that will transform what is happening in housing overnight. It needs to be managed and that is why we have a Minister and a Department for Housing, Planning and Local Government. It is true that some things will not work as well as initially intended. They will need to be reformed and we have done that in certain areas.

Turning to the issue of supply, the progress being made is not behind target. I addressed this earlier. It is unfortunate that Deputy Ó Broin is trying to undermine some of the facts behind the targets. It is clear that is what he is trying to do. We remain on target for what we set out in Rebuilding Ireland, which is 25,000 new homes this year. The overall target for new homes in the period 2017 to 2021 remains on track as well. Those targets will be ramped up again as we move into implementing Project Ireland 2040, which will replace Rebuilding Ireland. Regarding the monthly reports, we will continue to publish the numbers. I do, however, want more detailed quarterly reporting. It is not possible to do that more detailed reporting each month. I understand the point the Deputy is making about having month-on-month figures. That will only tell us one thing, however, while all sorts of other information is missing.

That is why I mentioned two improvements we will make: a quarterly report; and the independent research that is happening. They will address the other issues the Deputy raised of how long families are spending in emergency accommodation and the other challenges we face. I mentioned that in the first four months of this year there had been 329 exits of families from emergency accommodation into homes. That highlights the great work being done every week to help families.

We do not have enough social housing homes yet. When I talk about the increases we are seeing in the provision of social housing it is to welcome that we are increasing. The Deputy claimed that as a party, Sinn Féin does not claim the Government is not building social housing homes. He then stated, however, that eight times nothing is nothing and therefore he does give the impression that he believes nothing is happening. He cannot take those two sides. The supply of social housing is increasing. The point about eight times is that while I accept it is coming from a low base, it is increasing quite dramatically. We cannot go from nothing happening to 50,000 homes overnight. We cannot do it in a year but we can do it in years. When people say that we built thousands of homes in the 1950s, it will be true when we look back at Rebuilding Ireland, we will say that in those years we built thousands of homes but it will not happen in one or two years. The programme and timings we have are clear in terms of increasing the stock of social housing by 50,000 homes over the course of Rebuilding Ireland.

Regarding the number on the housing list, we have a determination in law for the calculation of the social housing need assessment. The Deputy cannot say that he does not like that and that he will add extra things to it and that therefore the numbers are increasing because that is not how this works. We know where we are from a social housing need perspective with just over 70,000 on the social housing list.

The housing assistance payment, which helps people in the private rental sector, is meeting the housing needs of people. When people go through HAP into the private rental sector, they are no longer on the list. The vast majority of people who are getting that support want it and they prefer the flexibility it gives. It works for them as tenants because they do not want to live in a particular area in a social housing home. They want to live in a different area in the private rental sector with HAP support and that is meeting their housing need. From a policy point of view, it allows us to achieve a social mix in existing built areas and in newly built areas that we might not have been able to achieve. In the future it will not be used to the extent today, but it will always be there as a component of the mix, ensuring tenants can have the flexibility they might want to have.

The Deputy spoke about my reaction to what is happening in emergency accommodation. He tries to present a picture to people that I do not appreciate the gravity of this. He should stop trying to personalise it to me. He has been doing that for two years now. I am not sure if he believes it is working. All the feedback I have got from people, including over the past weekend, is that it is not. Of course, I understand the gravity of this. It is the most pressing issue we have in society today and I am responsible for getting people out of emergency accommodation and preventing them from entering emergency accommodation. If the Deputy wants to dance on top of me for the use of an individual word, he can go ahead.

I will continue to do my work to help people. I will continue to work with the NGOs and the local authorities. I have met people in emergency accommodation. I have met people coming out of hotels. I have met people in dire living situations with the outreach teams. I have also met people rough-sleeping. I have also met the people working on the front line trying to help these people and who recognise the work we are doing. Of course, we need to do more but it is not a small thing that in the first four months of this year, for every two families that presented to the local authorities, the NGOs were able to get a home for one of those families and unfortunately, not for the other family, which is what we need to change. Over the same period, for every family in April that was entering, another family was exiting. We also need to change that so no family is entering emergency accommodation. That is the work we continue to do, week in and week out, using all the levers available to us.

The Deputy talks about having policy alternatives, which he does. In certain areas he looks to tweak or change a policy. He suggests that if we are doing A, we should do B on top of it. I will come back and say why we cannot do that. Having proposed changes to aspects of what the Government is doing does not come close to being an alternative to a comprehensive plan like Rebuilding Ireland. Where there are good ideas, they get the support of the House. They get the support of the Government and my officials. I welcome the engagements we have had offline as a committee in the Department to tease through some of the issues and see where we can make improvements. When positive suggestions come from the committee, of course, I embrace them. However, I cannot do everything because I have to think about unintended consequences. I have made this point recently. People made changes in the recent past to try to improve one thing, accommodation standards, and it had the unintended consequence of people not being able to get secure accommodation.

As we look to do things in the rental sector, I have to think about other impacts it might have in respect of landlords. The Deputy spoke about the rental stock. For the past two years I have heard Sinn Féin Deputies and others hammering landlords and now they are turning around and asking what we are going to do about landlords exiting the market. While policy is important, words can do considerable damage. The proposals by some Deputies had landlords saying, "That's it. If this gets through into law, I'm not going to be a landlord any more." I am in a position of saying it will not get through into law, because it does not have the popular support of the House, but it still has an impact.

The Deputy asked what we have done for landlords. We introduced 100% mortgage interest relief for landlords in the last budget and the Sinn Féin leader, Deputy McDonald, hammered it. That is something we were trying to do to help keep landlords in the sector and Sinn Féin hammered it. The Deputy cannot continue to play both sides of this. As we want more institutional investors, larger landlords, coming into the build-to-rent sector, I have made changes to the guidelines to help them in. When someone is coming in and trying to do that, they are making a long-term play as landlords over 20 or 30 years. They are not independent landlords looking for some kind of capital appreciation on a property with a view to exiting in five, ten or 15 years. It is a much longer, more sustainable commitment. That is part of achieving more of a balance. As independent, smaller and accidental landlords leave, as is their right, we are replacing them with some other independent landlords but also with larger institutional landlords.

I am very glad the Deputy does not have a difficulty with the concept of co-living. It is important to note that co-living cannot be sold on like individual apartments can be. That is also true for the build-to-rent sector. That is one of the protections in place in that regard.

Cost rentals are taking a bit longer. If we were to start a cost-rental project and set a rent for the next 30 years and we found ten years in that the financial modelling was incorrect, it would force hundreds of thousands of people into housing insecurity. We need to ensure we are thinking about the long-term horizon. That is why the European Investment Bank is now carrying out detailed analysis of costings, as has the National Development Finance Agency, NDFA. We have also done some analysis - I have seen it for certain sites - to see if the rent equates to one third of the disposable income of a person at the entry level point in the public service and in certain other jobs. We have found that it does and we are trying to lock that into our modelling on that.

The pilot on the quality standards framework is now complete. We will roll that out over the next 12 months. In my recent engagement with the Ombudsman for Children, I spoke about this in detail. It is a very good framework. It has been developed with the experts in the sector and the NGOs. I am not against independent inspections at a future date but I want to get the quality standards framework in place first and then see what we do in that area. That is what I communicated to the ombudsman. The priority now is to get that quality standards framework out across the country over the next 12 months.

On approved housing bodies, AHBs, the Department of Finance is leading on the accounting treatment when it comes to our balance sheet of AHBs. Not all the large AHBs have been counted as per the CSO and EUROSTAT decision. Therefore this is more complex than had they always been put on balance sheet. We have received proposals from representatives of the sector as to how we can work around getting them off balance sheet. It has been led by the Department of Finance. It is not hindering development to date and I am working to ensure it does not hinder any future investment in AHBs, as we seek to include AHBs more in the delivery of social housing and other forms of housing.

The Deputy asked about nearly zero energy buildings, NZEBs, and gas boilers. Gas boilers are being phased out anyhow. There has been a decrease of approximately 30% in the use of gas boilers in homes in recent years. I have more precise statistics on this. At the moment I am engaged with the Minister, Deputy Bruton, on the climate action plan the Government will introduce in coming weeks, about how we ensure that as we introduce NZEBs, passive buildings and other things, we also reduce gas boilers as a solution, which is already happening in itself. As we do that, we need to have a pipeline for supply and maintenance of alternatives and that is happening.