Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

My constituency is an example, where the local authority recently advertised a new affordable housing scheme offering one-bedroom units at €200,000, two-bedroom units at €230,000 and three-bedroom units at €300,000. By any standards these are not affordable prices for working families on low incomes. While I welcome the establishment of the affordable homes partnership and wish its chairman, Mr. Des Geraghty, every success in its efforts, I do not want to see it being used as a means to drive working families out of city centres or areas where there are high property prices, as a type of social cleansing tactic on the part of the Government.

The story on the direct provision of social housing is even worse. NESC estimates that 73,000 additional units need to be provided between 2004 and 2011. That translates as a social housing output of between 10,000 and 11,000 units per year for the next seven years. In recent years total social housing output, that is, local authority construction and dwellings provided through the voluntary and co-operative sectors, have been running at about 4,000 to 5,000. This year, however, for the second year running the numbers are down. The number of local authority houses completed in the first six months of 2005, at 1,376, is 14% less than the number for the same period in 2004, and the 2004 output was down almost 22% on 2003.

Looked at over a longer time period, the picture is even more depressing. In the national development plan, the Government committed itself to provide an additional 35,500 local authority dwellings between 2000 and 2006. Up to the end of June this year, it delivered 19,660. With 18 months to go to the end of the NDP, 45% of the promised council houses have yet to appear.

The NDP also promised 4,000 voluntary sector dwellings per annum. In 2004, 1,607 dwellings were completed, less than half the rate that was promised. The targets for shared ownership and affordable transactions of the non-Part V type also were not met. The target in both cases was 1,000 per annum, and last year they came in at 798 and 869 respectively. In the Sustaining Progress national wage agreement of 2003, the Government promised 10,000 additional affordable houses on top of all the other schemes, including Part V. So far not a single one of these dwellings has been provided.

In 2004, the total social housing output was 6,117 units. This compares poorly with the private sector achievement of 71,808 units. Against a backdrop of estimated housing need among the poor, old and disabled in the tens of thousands, this is a failure on any level. Voluntary and co-operative output is in the region of 1,600 units each year. However, this is far below capacity and expectation and one must wonder why that is. Perhaps the fact that the units cost limits have not been revised since 2002 is a contributing factor. Is the Minister aware of the effect of building price inflation on the output of social housing stuck with unit costs that are already three years behind?

Perhaps another reason is the collapse of the low cost site scheme, whereby housing associations can acquire land from local authorities to build social housing. A grand total of 87 sites were made available under this scheme last year. It is fair to say that this scheme has been all but abandoned. Does the Minister have any plans to revive it or perhaps to implement the recommendations of the NESC housing report as regards active land management mechanisms?

Another area of policy which seems to be left hanging is the provision of direct access for housing associations to the Housing Finance Agency which was brought into legislation in 2002, another three-year gap in terms of getting a result. There is also a gap in the assessment of housing needs. Such an assessment was carried out by all local authorities in March this year and despite the urgent need for up-to-date data, we still have not got the figures as regards housing need.

Instead of providing applicants for social housing with good secure homes through local authorities and voluntary and co-operative housing bodies, the Government is delivering up the social housing applicants as State subsidised tenants to the private rented sector, through the rent supplement and new rental assistance schemes.

The policy of State subsidisation of rent in the private rented sector is not sustainable in the longer term. It makes little sense for the Government to subsidise some rents by up to €952 per month, when the same amount, and in some cases less, would pay the mortgage on the same property. The rent supplement scheme is now acting as a new poverty trap and a disincentive to work. Rent supplement is generally available only to those who are on social welfare payments and tenants lose it if they take up work, or if partners decide to live together and one of them takes a job. This needs to be remedied urgently so that people do not lose rent assistance if they return to work.

There is the danger of a new type of "ghettoisation" as considerable parts of new apartment developments are turning over almost exclusively to tenants in receipt of rent supplement and the quality and design of some of them is not suitable for family living. The housing problems facing the poorest people in society are worse now than they have been at any time in my 20 years as a public representative. Time and again the Labour Party has called for changes to Government housing policy, but to no avail. This Administration will not change its housing policy. Change will come only with a change of Government.

The challenge set down so clearly in the NESC report will not be easy, not least because policy options which would have worked seven or eight years ago, or even more recently, are not now available. The housing problem has to be addressed in circumstances where many families have committed enormous sums to purchase their homes, and in some cases are over-borrowed, and care must be taken not to expose them to further financial risk. Similarly, we must ensure that the policies pursued do not adversely affect construction activity, which accounts for a large segment of the economy.

The Labour Party's starting point is that every person has a right to a home. Indeed, we have proposed a constitutional amendment which would make the right to a home an element of the wider social and economic rights which the Labour Party believes should be guaranteed by the Constitution. The duty of Government is to ensure that every person, every family, has access to housing, at an affordable price, on tenure which is secure and is adequate to their needs. That objective can be met by a number of means. The first step is to maximise the numbers who can purchase their own homes. The NESC report identified two major problems in this regard, namely, the difficulty in assembling a deposit and, second, the problem of affordability blackspots.

The second step is to implement Part V of the Planning Act in an effective way. Part V should be capable of generating 5,000 social and affordable dwellings per annum. The third step is to reform and widen eligibility for the shared ownership and the affordable housing schemes. The eligibility and income limits need to be lifted urgently in both cases. The fourth step is to establish a national housing authority to provide support to local authorities and to help the voluntary and co-operative housing sector to meet its targets. The task of the national housing authority would be to meet the targets recommended by the NESC, specifically the provision of 73,000 additional social housing units up to 2011.

The fifth step is to replace the rent supplement, the mortgage and rental subsidies scheme, as well as the RAS, by a new housing benefit which would be related to need and affordability. The final step is to address the continuing speculation in building land through the implementation of the recommendations of the all-party committee.

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