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

I move amendment No. 47:

In page 9, between lines 24 and 25, to insert the following:

" "affordable housing" means housing that is sold or let by a local authority/Approved Housing Bodies, and can only be sold back to the local authority;".

We want affordable housing to stay affordable in perpetuity. In other words, we are in favour of affordably purchasable housing on public land as long as it always remains affordable and is never marketised. Therefore, we are including a provision which would mean that if affordable housing is sold on by somebody who was eligible to purchase it in the first instance, he or she would have to sell it back to the local authority and would not profit from it. In this way, the property would not become marketised or commodified. We fully agree with people's aspiration and desire to have security regarding their home. Given the associated security, it is entirely legitimate that people would decide at some point to move from renting a home to owning their own home. The State should provide a stock of affordable housing but we do not believe that this housing should later become marketised. The amendment is a very simple measure stipulating that if an affordable property is sold on at any point, it should be sold back to the local authority. While reasonable inflation might be taken into account, nobody would make a profit from it. It would not be difficult to come up with a formula to achieve that.

Amendment No. 219 implies that we need to define "affordability" having regard to people's income. We are saying the amount should be 25% of somebody's income. That is a reasonable amount that people would have to expend on either affordable rental or affordable purchase. It should not be more than that. The Government and others may argue that the proportion should be increased to one third but people are in some cases spending 50%, 60% or 70% of their after-tax income on rent or a mortgage. Even with the affordability caps the Government is talking about, it is almost Orwellian to suggest one could still define as affordable a home whose worth is as much as €450,000, or €400,000 in other areas. It is quite bizarre. Setting that point aside, we want a reasonable proportion of people's income to dictate the definition of "affordability" with regard to State-provided affordable housing. Those are the arguments in favour of our two amendments.