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

The argument that if regulatory measures are introduced, whether that is controlling rents to make them affordable or other measures to protect tenants, it will lead to an exit of landlords simply proves that the private rented sector is incapable of dealing with the crisis we now face. That is the inescapable conclusion. Notwithstanding the specifics of this credit or this or that measure, and I will come to that in a second, if that fundamental fact is not grasped we are not going to deal with the crisis. It is now clearly apparent that we are looking at a catastrophic market failure. The builders cannot build houses at affordable prices. The private rental sector is incapable of delivering affordable rents. Deputy Healy-Rae then says that if we try to do anything about that, all the landlords will exit the market. We hear this from the Government as well. It is a hopeless situation. You cannot win. We had better grasp that.

The only medium- to long-term solution is the State, on a massive scale, ramping up its own provision of social and affordable housing, which is not dictated by market conditions or profitability but ipurely by the need to provide affordable housing. If we do not do that, it is not just the left that will be shouting and screaming. I met with representatives of the Dublin Chamber of Commerce today. They would be on quite a different end of the political spectrum from me in many regards. The first issue they raised was housing, the lack of affordable housing in the city and how that is causing massive problems in Dublin and in urban centres across the country. We are facing an existential crisis and we need to grasp that.

I understand that this is just one measure but I personally do not believe tax credits are the way forward, or certainly not in isolation. They are just chasing unaffordable rents. It is, in effect, a public expenditure of money to chase completely unaffordable rents. Having said that, if that is all the Government is going to do, it should at least be the case that there is equitable access to those things. I do not agree with them in principle but there should be equitable access insofar as they are being made available. That is the logic of Deputy Barry's amendment.

It seeks to ensure that, for example, people who are over a certain age or in full-time education are able to access the credit, along with people whose earnings are so low that they do not have a sufficient tax liability to access it. I will suggest for consideration another group that will not benefit but that needs support. I do not know if there figures as to exactly how many people are in this group but it is a big cohort. I refer to people who are paying housing assistance payment, HAP, top-ups. People who are in social housing or who are in receipt of HAP do not benefit. That is okayish if your rent is limited to 15% of your income but great numbers of people are paying massive top-ups in addition to the 15% of income that social housing or HAP tenants pay to the council, which is a scandal. I have just come from the Raise the Roof press conference where Louise Bayliss from Focus cited an example but I know that many in my constituency are also in this situation. In this case, the person, a single parent, was paying a couple of hundred euros to the council under a HAP arrangement but was also paying a top-up of €790 directly to the landlord. That person is getting no relief. I ask the Minister to respond to that.

On the exit of landlords from the market, this is something of a mantra. The Minister has again cited Berlin as an example and so on. There is a way to stop that exit, which is for the State to buy up all of those properties, particularly where people are facing homelessness as a result of the exit although, frankly, I do not see why the State does not just prevent the exit of the properties. If the landlord wishes to exit for whatever reason, and I personally believe it has as much to do with high property prices as any regulatory or tax burden landlords believe they are suffering, the State has money, particularly in the rainy day fund, to buy property. That is a better expenditure of State resources because, if we do not prevent people from going into homelessness, it costs the State a hell of a lot more, even in HAP payments if such people manage to get a HAP tenancy at some point in the future. This is a very significant and ballooning current expenditure as against significant upfront capital expenditure in the here and now that saves the State money in the longer term and saves a lot of people real hardship.

I was dealing with a woman this week whose family, a working family, is over the income thresholds and is being evicted from the home she has lived in since the 1950s with her two children. She and her children were bawling crying in my office. There is nothing available to her because she is over the threshold. There is no emergency accommodation, no HAP and no possibility of social housing. She is absolutely goosed and, on the income she has, cannot afford the unaffordable rents seen essentially everywhere in the Dublin area. The answer to this, in addition to rent controls, rent freezes and so on, is for the State to step in and buy those properties to prevent families being made homeless.