Pádraic McCormack (Galway West, Fine Gael)

This Private Members' motion deals with the shambles local authorities face in housing. The Government is clearly responsible for how it has squandered money in the past ten years which has led to the neglect of the social housing sector. There is no possibility of the problem being addressed in the current economic climate, given that the Government was not able to address it in the previous ten good years. The Minister of State referred to turkeys at Christmas but the chickens are coming home to roost for the Government. He should not have been so critical of the motion tabled by the Labour Party and Sinn Féin, as it is vital to discuss the serious housing problem we are facing. I do not know who wrote the speech the Minister of State had to read. He is a decent man but what he outlined does not tally with the situation faced by local authorities.

I am familiar with the figures for County Galway and Galway city and I am sure the picture is the same nationally. In County Galway, for example, 1,800 people are on the social housing waiting list and 550 on the affordable housing waiting list, giving a total of 2,350. Last year 175 social and affordable houses were provided and the total provided so far this year is only 116. If we continue at that level, even if nobody else is added to the housing list, it will take up to 20 years to clear the housing waiting lists in County Galway. That is a fact which contradicts some of the statistics given by the Minister of State. I will have to study his figures carefully, as I do not see how they measure up.

In Galway city there are 2,285 people on the social housing waiting list and 350 on the affordable housing waiting list, giving a total of 2,735. Last year 167 houses were allocated and fewer will be allocated this year. At this rate, taking the figures for the past two years to form an average, if nobody else is added to the social and affordable housing waiting lists, it will take at least 15 years to clear the current housing waiting lists in Galway city. While I accept the Minister of State has only been responsible for the matter since his appointment, his predecessors are responsible for the past ten years of neglect.

Based on what the Minister of State outlined and in spite of the figures I quoted, the Government will do nothing to address the matter, apart from allocating less money to local authorities next year. The sad reality is that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of completed new houses in Galway city and county that lie idle but local authorities have not been provided with sufficient funding to buy even one house. As the Minister of State knows, those houses are now better value than what the local authority could provide them for. The solution to the problem is to release money to housing sections of the local authorities. I have in mind Galway, but this applies to the whole country. Even if they bought only a few from the developers who have completed the houses, it would regenerate the finances in the local area. The builder would be able to pay off his or her suppliers, plasterers, carpenters and so on. That, in turn, would create a more vibrant local economy. The Minister of State will never have as good a value again as he can get now in housing.

There are people in my city and county being threatened with court action because they have not been able to pay the development charges. They have offered the local authority an apartment or house in lieu of the development charges. The local authority is unable to take up the offer of that apartment or house at very good value because it has no finance available to it. I appeal to the Minister of State to look into that aspect and help to alleviate the hardship as reflected in the housing statistics for Galway city and county.

The cutback in funding for housing repairs reflects another sorry state the Government has got us into. There is a pretence that grants are available for housing repairs. Formerly, grants were available under three headings for housing repairs: special housing aid for the elderly, which is dealt with by the HSE; essential repairs grants, which allowed elderly people, often living alone, to repair a house; and disabled person's grant, now known as the house adaptation grant. The HSE and one local authority in my area have not taken applications for the past four months. People are being pushed from Billy to Jack, under the pretence that they will be assessed for grants, and nothing happens. In some cases, people whose grant applications were approved, borrowed the money to repair the house or install a downstairs bathroom for an invalid, and now neither the local authority nor the HSE has the money to pay the grant. The Minister of State must take a serious look at housing grants as well in considering this motion.

Included in the motion and referred to by my colleague, Deputy Terence Flanagan, is the involvement of management companies in apartment blocks and housing estates throughout the country. I have raised this with the Minister of State's predecessors for the past four or five years. I have raised it on the Adjournment and other people, too, have asked questions, but yet nothing has been done. More than a year ago, the current Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government told me that within a week he would have a report from the working group he had set up, on proposed action in respect of management companies. No legislation has been introduced and people are suffering on housing estates and in apartment blocks because of management companies over which they have no control. I drew the Minister's attention at the time to the fact that both of the Galway local authorities were inserting conditions into planning permission, ensuring that management companies would have to be set up. Will the Minister of State, or whoever will reply to the debate tomorrow night, state whether the practice of local authorities inserting such conditions into planning permission has been eliminated? I know, on the basis of information from previous Ministers, that the local authorities have received letters from apartment owners saying this practice must be discontinued. However, it has continued long after the circulars were issued to the local authorities.

When the Minister of State addresses this issue tomorrow night, will he deal with the facts about the waiting lists for houses and not just rely on a prepared script? I have given him the facts. I checked them today with both Galway local authorities. Between Galway city and county, there are 9,990 people on the waiting list, mostly for social housing but some for affordable housing. Yet taking an average for this year and last both local authorities will only provide 317 accommodation units for those people. That rate effectively indicates that it will be 15 or 16 years before the list is cleared in Galway. Will the Minister of State deal with that fact and most importantly, release money to the local authorities so that they may acquire some of the very good value for money houses now on the market.

Some management companies set up by the developer or the builder of the estate are charging households anything from €500 up to €2,000. I know of estates in Galway where there are only five or six houses, perfectly finished, and yet there is a management company in place. I know of an estate with 32 houses, and one site is left vacant. Builders will sometimes leave one house unfinished, so that the local authority may not take the estate in charge while waiting for the one house to be finished. This is a ruse to keep the management company in place, despite the fact that the 31 other householders would be quite willing to run their own estate rather than paying €800 or €900 a year, or perhaps much more. One sometimes finds the same directors in a management company as in the building firm that built the houses in the first place.

When will the legislation be introduced that the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government promised me on 15 October 2007? He said he would have the report within a week and would then introduce the legislation. That report is almost four years in gestation. I raised the matter in 2005-06 to try to have something done about the crisis involving management companies. Some householders signed contracts before they noticed the small print about management companies, and having sold their own houses, found themselves trapped because the necessary legislation had not been introduced to deal with the problem.

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