Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

There are 90,000 people on the social housing waiting list at present. This represents a 30% increase on the 2007 figure. One in five of these people has been on the list for more than five years. The combination of cuts to rent allowance and other social welfare payments, the increase in rents and the introduction of zero-hour contracts is putting tenants in the private rental market in an impossible position. I discussed the need for rent control with the Minister of State recently. I believe we should take a serious look at what our German and French counterparts are doing in order to better protect tenants and prevent landlords from hiking up rents. Almost one third of all buy-to-let mortgages are now in arrears, which means the tenants in these properties find themselves in a very unclear position. To whom should they pay their rents? What are their rights if the banks decide to increase their rents? I note that Threshold has called for the Residential Tenancies Act to be amended to ensure that when receivers take control of properties, they step into the shoes of landlords and assume their responsibilities.

A basic search on a website like daft.iequickly shows how difficult the situation has become for people who depend on rent allowance. Most advertisements indicate that the landlord will not accept rent allowance. In my constituency of Wexford, the maximum rent limit under the rent supplement scheme for a single person living in shared accommodation is €250 a month. When a member of my staff searched daft.ieyesterday, she found just three properties that meet this criterion. All three advertisements stated clearly that rent allowance would not be accepted. I suggest that it should be illegal for landlords to refuse tenants who are in receipt of rent allowance. According to the Department of Social Protection, some 80,000 people are receiving rent allowance. Many landlords are excluding these people from the private rental market.

Vulnerable young people are among those most adversely affected by current Government and landlord policies. Even if they can find a landlord willing to accept rent allowance, they are likely to be priced out of the market due to the rent limits imposed by the Minister, Deputy Burton, and the price increases. Social housing and private rental accommodation are two of the main exits out of homelessness. Both are essentially unavailable to homeless people in the present climate. The significant barriers that are preventing homeless people from accessing the private rental market are leaving most such people trapped in emergency homeless accommodation. Rents in Dublin have increased by 18% since 2011. The level of rent allowance payable by the Department of Social Protection has fallen by 28% in the same period.

As Fr. Peter McVerry has said, the 90% drop in social housing output between 2007 and 2011 has resulted in a 100% increase on the social housing waiting list. The number of people on the list increased from over 43,000 in 2005 to almost 90,000 today. Fr. McVerry has pointed out that the Government's allocation of funding for the construction of 449 new homes over the next two years would reduce the waiting list by 2% if the list was not growing all the time. It clear that the Government does not have a coherent plan to deal with the housing and homelessness crisis. When John McManus wrote about the rapid increase in Dublin house prices in The Irish Timesrecently, he argued that "policy in this area continues to be made on the hoof and is vulnerable to all the special pleading and political lobbying that served the public interest so badly the last time around". He continued:

The rapid increase in Dublin house prices clearly took the Government by surprise. It also seems to have no idea what is the root cause of it and thus what is the solution. As a result, vested interests have filled the vacuum and seem to be driving the policy response.

It has been admitted that 10,000 new social housing units will be needed each year if this crisis is to be dealt with. According to an article in today's The Irish Times, the national total for the number of local authority houses built last year was just 293. By comparison, some 5,000 social housing units were built in 2007, bad and all as things were at the time. The article points out that "The State has handed responsibility for providing homes for social welfare recipients over to a private sector that, now it no longer needs them, doesn’t want them". Fr. Peter McVerry said recently that "after 30 years of working to eliminate homelessness, I believe the problem is now worse than ever, perhaps even out of control". Is the Government actually interested in building the number of social housing units that are required?

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