Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Two years into the Government's term of office, we finally get to discuss housing and a housing Bill. However, it is a one-page, apparently technical, Bill. This is extraordinary. As everyone knows, we are an economic mess. Week in, week out, the Government states it must cut people's pay and conditions, impose brutal austerity on public services and sell off State assets because we have no money. I do not agree with its decisions, but at least it has a plausible argument. The one factor about which it does not have an argument is housing. The State has no shortage of housing or capacity to build it. Were one to ask the schoolchildren in the Gallery whether they understood how 100,000 families could be on the social housing waiting list when 340,000 houses were empty, they would scratch their heads and say "no". They would be right not to understand. In the State's history, it has never had a longer housing waiting list or more empty houses. This is beyond belief. If someone came from Mars and saw that we could not resolve this problem, he or she would believe that we were an imbecilic race.

Like my grouping and Sinn Féin, Labour Party Members know from their clinics how serious this issue is. Every week, more than 50% of the many people attending my clinic do so for housing issues. They have been five, ten or 15 years on the waiting list. Those periods keep getting longer. People who put themselves on the list when their first child was born have still not secured a home by the time their child is 14 or 15 years of age. It is an appalling indictment of successive Governments, including this one, that it cannot resolve the problem. Two years into this Government's term of office, we have been given a one-page technical Bill that will have no impact whatsoever on the problem. This is extraordinary.

I wish to raise the general issue of housing, factors that should be addressed in any housing Bill. Before I do, I will discuss the Bill's contents, as I am not sure that it is a technical Bill. Its stated intention is to ensure the harmonisation of rents and it is asserted that matters other than a household's income, such as market rents, should not be taken into account, thereby providing a greater level of fairness. Elected members of local authorities will have a say and discretion in the setting of rents. This sounds okay on the face of it, particularly given the inexplicable diversity in the levels of rent charged across the State, a fact to which the Minister of State alluded. The Dublin city and Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown areas are victims of this inconsistency, with rents that are significantly higher than those found in other parts of the country. If one is a public sector worker, one's wages are the same regardless of whether one is in Dún Laoghaire or County Donegal. If one is a social welfare recipient, one's income is the same in Dublin city as it is in County Mayo. I agree with the Minister of State that this differential is unfair, as it bears no relation to ability to pay. We must address this issue. It is unacceptable that Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council's attitude in recent years seems to have been that charging people in social housing higher rents is justifiable, given its location and the prevailing market prices. It is not justifiable. Will the Bill address this issue?

Will the Minister's baseline criteria for the setting of social housing rents and the discretion afforded local councillors lead to a levelling down, as I hope, or a levelling up of rents? I suspect it will be the latter. This may be the reason for the Bill. When one considers giving local authorities discretion to raise rents, the first thought that comes to mind is of the fact that the so-called property tax, which is supposed to be a tax on the ownership of residential property, is also to be applied to local authority housing. Local authorities must find the extra money, even at the lower band. The starting point could increase. The amount levied can also be varied upwards or downwards by 15%. Given the chronic underfunding of local authorities, it most certainly will not be varied downwards. Pressure will be applied on local councillors to increase rents to meet their obligations under the new, unjust property tax that the Government will apply on social housing. What is apparently a democratic reform is actually a way to pass the buck of political responsibility for the imposition of the property tax to local authorities.

The big caveat is that there will be discretion, notwithstanding the Minister's baseline criteria for the setting of rents based on income, to increase rents for services provided to the dwellings, namely, the property tax. That is what I think this is about in reality.

Seeing as the Minister of State is worried about rents, another issue she could have addressed – setting aside the other bigger issues and the catastrophic failure to deal with the housing crisis in this country – is the gross injustice of the fact that public sector workers pay higher rents than other people in social housing. It is due to the fact that when determining rents, the pension levy is not taken into account by local authorities. Public sector workers pay 7% to 10% extra on the pension levy, as well as the universal social charge, PRSI and all the rest of it. They have a specific extra burden of 7% to 10%, yet local authorities do not take that into account when it comes to calculating rents. That means public sector workers who might earn exactly the same as equivalent private sector employees pay significantly higher rents if they live in social housing. If the Minister of State is serious about addressing fairness and harmonisation in rents, she must take that into account because it is grossly unfair.

Those are my comments on the Bill. I would be very interested to hear the response of the Minister of State on property tax and the issue I have raised. Apart from what is in the Bill, the key issue is what is not in it.

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