Seán Fleming (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail)

I am glad to have an opportunity to speak on the Housing (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2008. This wide-ranging legislation covers many issues relating to housing at local authority and other levels. It is an issue close to the heart of every public representative, both at national and local level, and is important considering the current economic situation.

I must give credit to the Minister of State at the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, with responsibility for housing, Deputy Finneran. He has more knowledge, expertise and practical experience of this area than the majority of Members, from his involvement at local authority level over the years, from the Seanad and from the Dáil. Such is his level of knowledge, he could give much information to staff in his Department and to housing officers across the country.

I am delighted the rental accommodation scheme is being put on a statutory footing. The scheme has operated over several years with a good take-up. Many of those on the scheme would have been in the private rental market. The scheme gives security of tenure to those who avail of it. For those who were receiving supplementary welfare allowance from the Health Service Executive, if they took up part-time employment, they lost part of their rent supplement. This does not apply under the rental accommodation scheme. That scheme works as an incentive, whereas the old system was a disincentive to people to take up employment, creating a poverty trap in turn.

People in receipt of rent supplement through the Health Service Executive for private rental accommodation often refused offers of local authority housing. Under the differential rent system, the net amount they would have to pay as local authority tenants would be higher than that under rent supplement. In the last budget, moves were made to close this gap and I hope there will be further moves in the next budget. It is wrong that there should be a financial incentive for people to refuse a genuine and good offer of local authority housing.

With the numbers losing jobs, all Members are getting extra queries at their constituency offices about mortgage repayments. Many with mortgages who lost their principal source of income are falling into immediate difficulties with repayments. Understandably, they apply to the local community welfare officer for interest payments under the exceptional and urgent needs payment scheme.

While some 7,000 people have been assisted under the scheme, some applicants have run into difficultly. Several cases with which I have been dealing forced me to put down a parliamentary question on the scheme. In one instance, a community welfare officer made a decision that, in his opinion, the original interest being charged on the loan was excessive and refused any interest payment as a result.

By way of parliamentary question, I asked what criteria the Department of Social and Family Affairs had given to community welfare officers on reaching such conclusions. I was informed no criteria were issued; it is a matter for each community welfare officer in the Health Service Executive to make his or her decision.

That is a recipe for inconsistency and disaster. I have had to bring some cases to the social welfare appeals office. Essentially, one arm of the State claims a mortgage should not have been granted to purchase a house. However, the banking and financial institutions, regulated by another arm of the State, had no problems with the level of loans being approved. I am curious as to how a community welfare officer feels his level of expertise in this area is much greater than that of the financial services industry. It could well be that he is right because banks were giving out excessive loans. However, I want to know what criteria were used to determine some interest payments were excessive.

The Minister also informed me in the parliamentary reply that negotiations with the Irish Bankers Federation and other interested parties are ongoing to come up with a set of guidelines for this area. While I welcome these being introduced in due course, in the meantime people are falling through the cracks in the system. I understand there is pressure on the Department's budget but, that said, people should be given fair play. In the cases to which I referred, the applicants were not seeking amounts higher than they would have received under the rent supplement scheme. The outcome for them is that they may become homeless, which means they will fall back on the local authority only to be paid the full rent supplement scheme. Even if they wish to sell their homes to sort out the problem, they cannot put them on the market if they have an application for rent supplement or mortgage interest supplement.

While there are many good staff in local authorities, there are inadequate appeals mechanisms for those who feel they may have been harshly struck off a housing list. More to the point, a common feature of the past 12 months is that people are not being allowed onto housing lists. They are told they should not have moved out of the house they were in and that for a variety of reasons they are not being let onto a council's housing list. In many local authorities the person who makes a decision of that nature informs the applicant that he or she has a right of appeal. The appeal is sent to the director of service with responsibility for housing and he or she usually inquires of his or her colleague why the decision was made. Some 99 times out of 100 — I will not say nine out of ten — colleagues who work together in the same office support each other.

There is not a proper independent appeals system within local authorities, as in somebody who is not connected to the housing section. A number of those cases have gone to the Ombudsman. A better appeals system should be put in place. That would be in the interest of local authority staff who are in the front line dealing with difficult situations. I say that in a positive way. A proper appeals system would protect everybody involved. It does not need to be statutory, it just needs to be set up internally and it can be done as part of the housing strategy that any local authority and its elected members can pass.

I wish to discuss the voluntary organisations such as Clúid and Respond. I hope the ongoing issue of buying houses from voluntary housing schemes can be addressed at some point. People with houses from such organisations cannot get back onto a housing list as they are told they are adequately housed and do not have a housing need. That can happen in many towns. My constituency in Laois has many small towns. A local authority may build between 30 and 50 houses in one town. People who need housing can take up their tenancy and after a two-year period they can embark on a process to buy their house. In another town of the same size the housing needs might be addressed by Respond or Clúid. People in that town will never be able to buy their homes while their neighbours and cousins in the town up the road can buy their homes from the local authority. The public cannot understand why there is such a level of inconsistency. That is a valid point because, essentially, all those houses are being financed by the Exchequer in the first instance. I would like that issue to be addressed.

That leads me to an issue I have raised in the Chamber previously, namely, the tendering procedures for voluntary housing associations. Perhaps somewhere along the line it can be confirmed whether they come under the guidelines the Department of Finance issues for public bodies. Housing associations are not public bodies, they are voluntary organisations but in practice they are substantially funded by the Exchequer. While they are in that situation they are not strictly bound and they can have their own shortlist and tendering scheme that may not have the full rigidity and openness, which is what I am talking about, compared to when a local authority puts a similar housing scheme out to tender. There is a lacuna in the system. I consider such bodies as being essentially publicly funded.

In my constituency a voluntary organisation had grandiose plans for a development of 200 houses in a town. During the property boom it sold off a site. It made a killing on the sale of a site that had been bought with taxpayers' money, sold it off and then perhaps got involved in developments in other parts of the country. I have seen that happen. That is not what housing associations were set up to do. Some of them have been involved in straightforward land speculation. Such practices were funded by the taxpayer. Voluntary organisations have received their site and planning permission and then for some reason sold the site. Perhaps they did not have the funding to complete the project and offloaded it at major profit. They took the money out of the county and perhaps moved on to do some work in another area. I would like to see a bit more transparency in that regard.

A significant issue that is being addressed is antisocial behaviour in local authority estates. There is a big gap in the estate management procedure. I give credit to the voluntary housing organisations for their active engagement on a permanent basis with their tenants whom they meet on a regular basis. In comparison, local authorities tend to allocate a house, collect the rent and the only contact they have with their tenants is to respond to calls about maintenance for doors or windows. The community and green areas in local authority estates regularly fall into poor condition because the people who are in the houses do not own them. They are only renting and the owners, namely, local authorities, have other priorities. There is a greater need for hands-on estate management from local authorities. That would help strengthen the bond between tenants and local authorities and would eliminate some of the antisocial behaviour occurring there also. I accept that happens to some extent but more needs to be done.

People who have local authority houses can find their incomes improve and they can afford to drive big cars and have Sky television yet they ring the local authority if something is wrong with the plumbing in the house. Somewhere along the line tenants should be responsible not just for basic repairs but also bigger maintenance jobs where they are in a position to do so. Most people agree that information should be shared on a restricted basis between key nominated staff members in local authorities, the Garda Síochána, local social welfare offices and the Health Service Executive to ensure proper cross-referencing of people and to ensure that people's histories are known before they are allocated local authority housing. That is happening on an informal basis but it should be put on a formal structure.

A feature of many new local authority estates is that they contain a large proportion of lone parents, especially women, raising young children. Many single parents have come to me with concerns about antisocial behaviour in an estate by bigger fellows who intimidate them. When they are in a house with young children they do not feel as capable of defending themselves against people who throw their weight around in an estate.

I wish to speak about the Part V targets versus the actual figures. I am not being parochial in saying I sincerely believe that the best housing authority in the entire State is Laois County Council. Its record of house construction and Part V agreements has been outstanding. The Deputy across from me is smiling but that is verified in the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government's statistics. All local authorities had a five-year plan but Laois County Council not only met its target, it exceeded it.

The published statistics for 2007 and the first nine months of 2008 were given recently to the Joint Committee on the Environment, Heritage and Local Government. Laois County Council had a construction programme of 309 houses and 204 were constructed through the Part V scheme. That is in excess of 500 houses. Counties with ten times the population of County Laois did not achieve that level of house provision. We have substantially cleared much of the housing list but it is starting to creep up again with people losing jobs. People are going on the housing list in order to avail of rent supplement. The only reason they want to go on the housing list is so that the council will stamp the form that will allow them to seek rent supplement from the Health Service Executive. Such people may not have a housing need but they need financial assistance to pay their rent. That is quite a different issue from having a housing need.

Another matter that came to my attention in the statistics we were given in the committee last week is that in Laois we achieved a 50:50 balance under Part V between social and affordable housing, whereas only 36% of houses that came in under Part V in 2007 were social and the balance were affordable. In the first nine months of 2008 the figures were worse again. It was 27% nationally. I would like to see those figures at 50:50, as is the case in County Laois. There is a tendency among housing authorities to allow more of the affordable houses under Part V and in that way they are neglecting the people who could be accommodated by a traditional social housing programme, albeit under the Part V scheme.

At a time when new schemes to provide housing are being introduced, it is important people in local authorities are trained to deal with the issues. If local authority staff are to give advice to people looking for local authority loans, they must be able to explain the difference between fixed and variable loans. They need some level of financial expertise to be able to advise people in that regard. Sometimes people do not have that expertise and give a stab at the figures without having the required knowledge and information. People looking for loans think they are getting good advice when they get advice from someone in the local authority on these issues, but in some cases the information is not well founded. I would like to see extra training for people in those sections of local authorities.

I expect the Minister will bring forward some proposals with regard to the large stock of unsold affordable housing that exists. It is important this happens quickly because these houses are costing money. We are all aware the value of houses on the open market has gone down and as a result the affordable houses on offer from local authorities are now on offer at market prices which have dropped significantly. Local authorities, however, have not been able to drop their prices. As I understand it, the scheme was originally intended to be self-financing. Therefore, the local authorities cannot just wipe €50,000 off the price of an affordable house without some consequence or without somebody picking that up.

I urge all local authorities to ensure they put sufficient funds in their estimates to ensure they are in a position to draw down the maximum grants under the mobility housing aid scheme, the housing aid for older people and the housing adaption grant for people with disability. We get complaints year in and out that the Government does not provide the funds, but, regularly, this is the fault of local councillors not having put the portion required to be met locally into their estimates. This is what causes the shortfall and is the reason some people at local level do not get their grants. It is a two-way street. The Government provides good funding, but the local authority must provide a corresponding portion of funding, perhaps 20% of the total amount involved, out of its estimates.

I look forward to seeing this legislation proceed to Committee Stage and to it being enacted as soon as possible.

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