Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 20 June 2019

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government

Social Housing Bill 2016: Discussion

Photo of Mick BarryMick Barry (Cork North Central, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

The starting point for this discussion, which we should not take as a given and of which we should remind ourselves, is the greatest housing crisis in the history of the State. It is a housing emergency, with more than 10,000 people officially homeless and a generation that has in large measure been locked out of the housing market. Every serious analyst, think-tank and commentator, almost without exception, is now arguing that an increase in the supply of social housing is key to dealing with the crisis.

It has been suggested that we need to provide certainty to the market, and so on. The starting point for me is that we need to provide certainty to people who are being locked out of the market and we need to provide certainty to people on housing waiting lists and who are in homeless emergency accommodation. I have listened to the points that have been raised about unintended consequences but if we are talking about an evidence base, the first piece of evidence we should have put before the committee is not what might happen if we go down this road but what is happening.

I do not have the statistics to hand and I would like to have them for this discussion. However, let us take the last three years, 2016 to 2018, inclusive. What have local authorities and the State received in terms of social housing units on the basis of Part V? Against the context of a massive housing crisis, what have we got, what is the evidence and what are the numbers?

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