Barry Cowen (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State and apologise for being late. I have serious concerns about the legislation. For those who are homeless, on social housing lists and renting on a low or middle income, the economic recovery's most tangible impact is to make the prospect of home ownership and stable accommodation a more distant possibility than possibly ever before. This Bill does not address the chronic lack of supply in housing units and the Government's inaction on the matter. Instead it seeks to address matters that would be relevant if there was an adequate supply of social housing and a rental market that was not in crisis. This is not the situation in towns and cities across the country where people are struggling to get a foothold.

In terms of the specific details of the Bill, there are a number of issues I would like to address. To access the housing assistance payments, HAP, scheme a household will complete a social housing assessment by the local authority. Once the household has secured appropriate accommodation in the private rented sector, the local authority will pay the landlord directly, with a contribution by the household paid directly to the local authority. As everyone in this House is acutely aware, there is a massive shortage of accommodation in the rental sector. Not only will this adversely affect the cost of rent paid by the householder, but the sheer shortage of supply will severely reduce the number of people who can avail of the HAP scheme. Furthermore, by placing the onus on the tenant to find suitable private accommodation, the Government is merely attempting to cover for its own shortcomings and abysmal record in delivering housing to those in need.

The volatility of the rental market at present, with rents reaching run-away levels, will severely hinder the capacity or the capability of HAP and the rental supplement. The existence of a maximum level of rent which can be subsidised by the local authority requires tenants to pay a top-up from their social welfare payment which will impact on their standard of living and force tenants back towards substandard accommodation that is not approved under the scheme. The core issue is the lack of adequate supply in the social housing market, which the Government is doing precious little to alleviate, and no amount of window dressing will distract people from the real problem at hand.

We appreciate that there may be extenuating circumstances by which continued breach of a tenancy agreement may require extraordinary action to be taken. However, surely the focus should be on dissuading the tenant from committing such breaches. If a housing authority is to recover such a dwelling, who becomes responsible for housing the tenant who has been evicted? Removing people from their homes simply feeds into the cycle of homelessness and passes the problem back to the local authority which is legally obliged to house such people.

The tenant purchase element of the Bill makes no allowance for the reinvestment of funds gained by the local authority through tenants buying their local authority dwelling. Fianna Fáil has consistently identified the need for local authorities to ring-fence and reinvest money collected locally into the very services that will benefit the local authority's immediate area.

In a week in which the United Nations committee behind the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty is meeting in Dublin, the latest statistics present a damning indictment of this Government's abysmal performance in providing the most basic need of housing for the Irish people. Inner City Helping Homeless, ICHH, recently said the issue of homelessness in Dublin has surpassed "crisis point". The Dublin regional homeless executive confirmed that rough sleeping in the city had increased by "a shocking 200 per cent in the past 12 months". Focus Ireland had reported an 18% increase in demand for its services this year. Experts in the area calculate that an estimated 3,000 housing units are needed to address long-term homelessness with the "housing first" policy. There can be absolutely no doubt that the Government is presiding over the greatest crisis in homelessness in the history of this State.

The latest quarterly report by property website daft.ie, written by Trinity College assistant professor of economics, Ronan Lyons, has identified some alarming trends in the rental sector and has stated the country is now in the midst of a housing crisis. Rental prices are now approaching levels they were at during the peak of the boom. Rents have risen in all cities, with Cork and Galway experiencing a 6% rise, Limerick a 5% rise and Waterford a 1% rise. Dublin has experienced the largest annual increase in rent of 14%. Supply of accommodation needs to quadruple in Dublin; otherwise, those on lower incomes will be further marginalised and pushed right out of the market.

The lack of social housing means there now exists little or no safety net for a housing market that is fast becoming the preserve of a few at the expense of those on middle and low incomes.

There are now almost 100,000 people on the social housing waiting list. Legislation the Government introduced such as the Land and Conveyancing Law Reform Act, which is essentially a home repossession Act, has further exacerbated the problem by giving banks the power to repossess struggling home owners' properties.

There have been consistent delays in transferring NAMA properties, as we have said on numerous occasions during Question Time and other debates in the House, with only 500 transferred to date even though ten times that amount has been identified by NAMA as suitable for transfer. That is a very poor reflection on the House. We should think of the social dividend that was to have been availed of from NAMA. We have had announcements, year on year, about what NAMA would deliver. I ask the Minister of State to consider a dedicated, section within each local authority to speed up that process and address the major deficiencies and under-achievements in realising the expectations the Minister of State and others had, given what NAMA had at its disposal.

In 2012, the Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government, Deputy Hogan, stated that 2,000 housing units would be made available in 2012 to people on social housing lists through NAMA. Two years on, we are nowhere near that level of progress. The commitment given by the senior Minister that 2,000 housing units would be made available has failed. It needs a new focus, direction and commitment. A dedicated section within each local authority to deal with the mechanics - legal or otherwise - would be well informed and would have the potential to achieve the sorts of results we had all hoped would have been achieved by now.

To make matters worse, overall capital expenditure by the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government has been reduced from €740 million in 2013 to € 311 million this year. It gives me no great pleasure to say that these figures along with what has gone before represent a litany of broken promises by the Government and offer no comfort to the tens of thousands of people who are being consumed by the crisis in the housing sector.

We have outlined a series of real and practical steps the Government should seek to include in any future housing legislation the Minister of State might bring before the House. At the conclusion of her speech, she said she hoped to introduce a more comprehensive housing Bill to address these issues in the coming weeks. That is needed to tackle the interlinked private and social housing crisis. The Government should develop voluntary housing associations to a scale where they can access credit and start to build. It should use the tenant purchase scheme to fund future investments by local authorities. It should allow families on waiting lists to move into vacant homes and defray the costs of refurbishing them from future rent. We all know about the many empty units boarded up and not being availed of while many people on housing lists are crying out for those units. There is obviously something preventing the Minister of State from allowing families to refurbish them and have the cost defrayed on their rent. She should investigate doing that.

The Government should move towards a new capital expenditure programme for local authorities in excess of what it has promised. I know there are constraints on what it can do, but it should consider the National Pensions Reserve Fund in this regard.

The Government should ease restrictions on planning permissions and reduce development levies. These levies must be looked at and the Minister of State must give direction and leadership in that area to provide openings in the housing sector to spur on development. The Government should reduce windfall zoning tax to encourage development and introduce a vacant site levy. It should enable local authorities to suspend Part V requirements for a two-year period in order to see if that will encourage the sort of development we want to see. It should digitise planning process to improve times and reduce costs.

We are committed, as I am sure the Minister of State is also, to tackling the social housing waiting list. We need to revitalise the construction sector on a sustainable footing to get construction workers back in long-term employment and re-assert the fundamental right to housing for all citizens.

The Minister of State has stated the legislation will give effect to three important elements of the Government's housing policy. It is clear from the social housing crisis, a rental market that has reached boom time levels and record levels of homelessness that the Government does not have a housing policy of any substance. This Bill unfortunately falls abysmally short of what is required and represents a cynical ploy in box ticking and electioneering in the midst of the local election campaign.

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