Mick Barry (Cork North Central, Solidarity)
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I have three questions. My first question is on the housing assistance payment, HAP. Some of the statistics the witnesses have provided in the section on HAP are staggering. Mind-blowing would not be an exaggeration. Their report states that HAP is an expensive policy option and far more costly than building social housing directly. They calculate that over a period of 30 years in Dublin, €274,128 more would be spent on securing a social house through HAP than would be spent on a direct State build through the local authorities. Using Rebuilding Ireland's figure of 87,000 private rental units, they calculate that it would cost €23.8 billion more than direct State builds by local authorities over 30 years. If those statistics are anywhere near being correct, it means that Government policy on this issue is criminal and it is enriching landlords at the expense of society on a massive scale when better options are available. I ask the witnesses to stand over those figures and go into them in more detail because the implications are huge.

When local authorities meet in November to set their budgets for next year, there is a very strong case for them to decide that enough funding should be set aside, whether through loans or direct Government grants, and enough plans should be put in place to build very large numbers of local authority homes in their jurisdictions next year. There is a very strong argument that if those funds and plans are not in place, those budgets should not be passed and it should be put back into the court of Government, if necessary provoking a political crisis over this. The statistics in the report indicating 8,794 local authority builds in 1975, more than 4,000 in 2006 and 75 in 2016 would justify such a stance. Will the witnesses comment on a tripling of Exchequer capital funding to €1 billion per annum to allow 5,000 such homes to be built within 16 months?

If tenants receive notice to quit coming into this winter on foot of economic evictions and rent rises, they should give serious consideration to the difficult step of refusing to co-operate to the notice to quit, thereby refusing to play a part in making themselves homeless. I believe there would be strong support in many cases from friends, family, neighbours, housing activists and political parties of the left for such a stance. I am putting that out there, but I am asking the authors of the report to comment on their call for the amending of Part 4, section 34 of the Private Residential Tenancies Act, essentially to allow a greater security of tenure for tenants, which would be a very important legislative change. What do the witnesses have in mind in this regard?