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

Very good, I wanted to clarify that.

My amendment No. 907 would nicely dovetail with Deputy O'Callaghan's because the net result would be that we would get rid of vulture and cuckoo funds. My amendment proposes that the Part VII requirement, which used to be Part V, would not be 20% but 50% of social and affordable. My amendment proposes that, "In page 405... subject to subsection (12), a housing strategy shall provide that [as a general policy] a specified percentage". The Government says this should not be more than 20% of the land zoned. The Government is saying what is now Part VII provision for social and affordable is not to be more than 20%. I propose to amend that to say it shall not be less than 20% for social housing, and not less than 30% for social housing, the different categories of affordable housing, or both. It is giving flexibility on that additional 30%. To put it another way, we propose that a minimum of 20% should be social housing and another 30% should be a mixture of social and affordable housing as may be decided by the local authority. In total there would be 50% social and affordable housing. It is obvious to me why this should be the case. We can set current average incomes against average house prices and rents. A case involving two incomes is slightly different, but in cases involving a single income I would say that approximately 70% of people are now priced out of being able to afford the rents or house prices being charged in Dublin and many of the urban centres. We are going to have to face that fact, because I do not think we have faced it. The market is not capable of delivering affordable housing for between 60% and 70% of the population, and it never will be. That is my view. The evidence is pretty clear. Let us be honest - the housing crisis predated this. It just got a hell of a lot worse after 2008, and is now at dire proportions. It would be a very foolish person who suggests at this point that the market is going to resolve this for the majority of people. We have to face the fact that unless there is a spectacular increase in people's incomes they will never be able to afford this stuff, so what are we going to do about it? We have to do something and we have to do something urgently. Given where social housing income thresholds are, you have to be beneath a low level of income to get social housing. We have to have affordable housing as well as social. We obviously need to address that by raising those thresholds, but that is a separate debate.

A minimum of 50% of any housing that is built now has to be social and affordable. To be honest, the Minister of State should increase it to 60%. I am trying to get this amendment passed in order to move the debate forward. I note the situation in places like Austria and Finland. The latter is the only country in pretty much the whole of Europe that has actually seen its homelessness situation improve. This is because the state has taken control in the context of what is being built. The Finnish authorities are saying that they are not interested in housing being built just to make money and are only interested only in housing that is going to meet the needs of the people. They are beginning to impact on the level of homelessness because they have adopted that approach, which, in turn, is impacting on their approach to planning, etc. That is what I am arguing for. We have to do something radical like that because the market is failing so drastically.

I doubt that the Government is going to accept the amendment, but I honestly want it to start considering this. The situation is so bad that radical measures have to be taken now to address the utter unaffordability of the housing the market is delivering.