Fergus O'Dowd (Louth, Fine Gael)
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I welcome the witnesses today.

I am concerned about the way decisions on the rent pressure zones are made. I have specific questions if I may put them to the people present. I have spoken to the Private Residential Tenancies Board, PRTB, the Economic and Social Research Institute, ESRI, the Housing Agency, the Minister's office and many other people. I remain unconvinced that the statistics are accurate.

I will put my question in the form of a fact. I thank the Housing Agency for releasing to me the document given to it by Louth County Council without question. The document clearly states, on rent pressure zones, that there is a lack of available property to rent in County Louth and it has driven the cost of rents up, particularly in Drogheda and Dundalk. On the matter of supply of private rental properties, there are a number of properties currently advertised. The rents vary from €1,000 for a two-bedroom terraced house to €2,000 for a five-bed house and €1,400 for a three-bed house. These rents are not sustainable or affordable for the vast majority of people. The evidence that was given about the process by the council was that there were unsustainable and unaffordable rent increases. That document was not passed on past the Housing Agency. I am not being personally critical of anybody but it was not passed on. Therefore the argument that Louth County Council is making and I as a public representative am making about the rent pressure zones is that they are not taking into account actual rents or the views of the local authorities.

The other key point is this. The two parameters were that one had to have an increase over four of the six preceding months. The increase in rent in Louth, and certainly Drogheda, was greater than the national average in six out of six quarters. Rents are out of control there.

The other issue is that poverty-proofing was not taken into account in the formula. If the housing assistance payments are the key criteria for families with lower incomes, why was it not taken into account that housing assistant payments in County Louth and Drogheda in particular are higher than all other areas in the country, including a significant number of these rent pressure zones? The formula benefits the landlord but does not benefit the poorer person.

At the very core and heart of the witnesses' decision-making is the involvement of daft.ie, on which I cast absolutely no aspersions. It is a professional organisation for which an eminent academic works. How accurate are the rents that it puts on its web pages? I believe that those figures are not accurate. That is what landlords say they are asking, but what landlords demand is many times higher than that. I have evidence from my constituents that there are under-the-counter payments to landlords, that rent has an official value, but there is competition among tenants based on under-the-table payments to the landlord. How can the system be made fairer? Would it not be more reasonable to look at the housing assistance payments, HAP, rather than what daft.iesays the rents are? HAP is the true payment, and the true support, particularly for poorer families. These are the people who are suffering the most.