Damien English (Meath West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will make a quick comment on this. I have listened to a great deal of commentary about the help-to-buy scheme for many years and have seen many reports about it. Every report and comment nearly misses what we were trying to achieve. In that regard, this has been one of the most successful schemes we have ever had. Builders were building different types of homes for different customers and were not building the type of houses that first-time buyers were chasing back in 2016 or the ten years before that, because they did not believe that the demand was there. The demand was not there because people did not have deposits, could not get them together and could not raise the mortgages to pay for such houses. If anybody wants to go back to look at the supply of housing in those years, they will see that builders were building for those who were trading up or buying their second or third homes. They were not building the type of house that was needed by most first-time buyers. Any analysis will show that. This scheme was brought in to address that and to give confidence to a builder that they would have a customer who would buy that starter home or house. That is why the 40,000 houses delivered by means of that scheme may not have been built in its absence.

I would be against interfering. I absolutely accept the point about looking at long-term supply for schemes. There is nothing wrong with that at all. What we are trying to do with Housing for All is provide certainty to the housing market, which you cannot fix in one year and which you try to fix over five or ten years. You have to look at the supply of housing for the next ten or 15 years. Interfering today with something that might trigger a negative impact on the supply of a particular type of house would be wrong. The supply of housing is not fixed, and it will take a few more years to do that, regardless of who is in government. It takes time because we are trying to replace ten to 12 years of the loss of valuable housing. It is wrong to call it bananas and to interfere now with a scheme that is designed to deliver housing. There will be an endless argument over whether it has affected the price of a house by 1%, 2% or whatever, and that is another issue. The issue we need to focus on is supply. For a proper functioning housing market that will address the issue of housing once and for all, we will need to have every part of the market delivering. I refer here to social, affordable, private purchase, properties purchased for the purposes of renting out and build to rent. Everybody has to play their part or we will not fix the housing market. This policy and the help-to-buy scheme have had a major impact in a positive way on the supply of housing for the first-time buyer and should be kept for another number of years. It is fine in the long term if people want to change it. In the short term, however, until the supply of housing is fixed, we should not interfere with schemes that are working and delivering.