Emmet Stagg (Kildare North, Labour)

I thank Deputy Rabbitte for sharing time with me.

I welcome this Bill and the fact that the Minister agreed to bring it back to the House to complete Second Stage which will allow the Joint Committee on Justice, Defence and Women's Rights to deal with Committee Stage during the recess.

I accept the drafting of this legislation was complex and while the gestation period of some six years was extraordinarily lengthy, the Bill is an honest attempt to deal with the problems for families arising from unregulated management companies. The Bill has shortcomings that have been pointed out by our spokesperson, Deputy Pat Rabbitte, and the Labour Party's own legislative proposals took the co-operative route rather than the legislation now before us. There will be an opportunity on Committee Stage to examine these matters in detail and to amend and improve the Bill where required.

While this Bill deals with multi-unit house complexes, the main problem I have encountered is where management companies have been imposed on single-house housing estates. That is not to say that the management companies in multi-unit developments are satisfactory; none that I came across in this category was satisfactory and the worst of them all was in the Abbeylands in Clane. In this development, the company and the agent were directly under the control of the developer and the residents were effectively excluded from the decisions that affected them. In the case of single-house housing estates, the first to start the rot in Kildare was way back in the early 1990s when Seán Dunne's company, Mountbrook, imposed a condition on purchase that all householders were required to be under the aegis of a management company. St. Raphael's Manor in Celbridge is still under the yoke of that decision, with a charge against the property for non-payment of fees that are far less than reasonable. The only service provided is cutting of grass in the common areas, the maintenance of which is the responsibility of the developer in any case. Mr. Dunne's example was subsequently followed by the Kildare county manager. Managers got the authority from section 34 in the Planning and Development Act 2000, subsection 1(a) and subsection 4(i), which state:

Shortly after this Act was enacted, a rush of decisions were made in Kildare that included single-house estate and mixed developments or single and multi-units that had a requirement for a management company. In the case of a single-house estate development in Straffan, the condition states:

Each individual property owner shall be a party to the management company agreement and this agreement shall be registered as a burden on the individual property folios in the Land Registry upon the sale of each unit.

In an unregulated market, this gave developers the power and force of law to impose whatever charges they wished for whatever service they wished. In nearly all cases I have come across, the power was abused and young families with heavy mortgage requirements were given no option but to pay up. I do not think this was the intention of this section 34 of the 2000 Act but it was used by county managers to hive off their responsibilities for maintaining housing estates and to privatise that part of their duties. The effect of their decisions was to create a new form of ground rent with young, debt-burdened families left to the tender mercies of the developers, with, in some cases, fees of up to €2,000 per annum being charged to get the grass cut and a burden on the house title in default.

The Minister should now amend that section of the Planning and Development Act to prevent a continuation by county managers of this practice. It never ceases to amaze me that senior public service personnel never miss an opportunity to privatise part of the service for which they are responsible. Is it that they have no confidence in their ability to do the job?

There is absolutely no need for management companies in single unit housing estates. It is much more preferable that the residents organise a residents' association, charge a modest fee and get the job done. This also has the benefit of developing a community in new estates by neighbours working together and getting to know one another. This loose form of co-operative can also tackle other common issues which individuals are unable to tackle alone.

One might ask what is the urgency in getting this Bill into law. A number of factors create the urgency. Mostly young families are being ripped off for excessive fees for poor services without any choice or say in the matter. Second, because of the close relationship between developers, management companies and their agents - they are regularly one and the same - a situation has arisen in a number of cases where the developer has gone belly-up and where the management company and agent have disappeared along with the developer. In that situation there is no way to pay the fee and the burden of the unpaid fee is registered as a burden on the title of the house. As a result, the householder cannot get clear title and cannot sell the property. This needs to be addressed for those affected.

I thank the Minister for agreeing to bring the Bill forward at this time, thereby allowing it to progress during the summer. I hope this Bill, when completed, will give authority to residents over their own affairs and remove the current power of the developer and his agents, even where the developer has retained ownership of a number of units.

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