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

Against the background of an absolutely dire housing emergency, this Bill is a fairly pathetic response from the Government. One aspect of the legislation may have a marginal impact on the crisis we face and I will turn to that in a minute. However, against the overall background of record numbers of people presenting as homeless, that is, six per day, probably the longest housing waiting list seen in the history of the State, families with children presenting in increasing number as homeless because of a dramatic rise in rents and a chronic shortage of local authority housing, this Bill really is pathetic.

I had wished to see something positive because all I really want now is to be able to turn around to the families who are presenting to my clinic and to tell them there is a solution, there is light at the end of the tunnel and that they may have somewhere secure to live in a few weeks' time or even in a few months' time. Unfortunately however, this Bill does not offer that and nor does it offer any means to deal with the underlying madness of social housing policy as it is has been administered in recent years under both the present Government and its predecessor. This is because even if this measure works as the Minister of State hopes, the net result will be that the State still will be pouring approximately three quarters of a billion euro a year into the pockets of private landlords, which is just money down the drain. Moreover, it is completely unsustainable financially and in terms of providing the security of tenure social housing tenants need. It simply will not work. It is a waste of money and will not work and I wish the Government would realise that.

In the debate Members held on this issue a week or so ago, the Minister of State rightly stated this was not a problem that started with her and that the previous Government had laid the foundations of the current crisis. That is absolutely true and in fact, successive Governments, probably over the past 20 years or so, have laid the foundations for this crisis by dramatically reducing the direct provision of council housing and essentially outsourcing social housing to the private sector in the form of rent allowance and more recently, rental accommodation scheme, RAS, arrangements and other leasing arrangements.

That policy was not really very sustainable even during the boom period but the chickens have come home to roost in the current situation of economic crisis, with people's incomes being slashed and huge extra numbers of people needing social and affordable housing. This crisis is the consequence of the policy failures of successive Governments. When this Government came into office, instead of correctly analysing what was at the root of the problem and beginning to move in a different direction that could address the problem, every single action taken by the Government has made it worse and in fact has accelerated the processes that led to the crisis in the first place.

The Minister of State referred in her speech last week to the policy document produced by her Department in June 2011. I am not sure if Deputy Jan O'Sullivan was the Minister of State at that time because Deputy Penrose may have been the Minister of State then. That document to which the Minister of State still refers, sets out the ingredients of the current crisis. At the time there was no discussion in the Dáil. I refer to press releases which I issued on 14 June 2011 stating that this policy would be a disaster because the Government was accelerating the privatisation of social and affordable housing. We held a press conference in Buswell's Hotel with groups like Tenants First and a number of people on the housing list. We said at the time that this policy would be a disaster. I raised the matter with the Tánaiste in July 2012. I said that the combined effect of the policies set out in that document - I will paraphrase the policies but the reference can be checked if necessary by anyone who is interested - was to cease the direct provision of new capital projects for building social housing and to rely primarily on leasing arrangements with the private sector and some talk of the voluntary sector as well. That was the policy which combined with reductions in the rent caps which followed in two subsequent budgets, have acted as a pincer which has produced the housing crisis and the homeless emergency. In July 2012 I said to the Tánaiste that it was not an exaggeration to say that the Government's new housing policy and cuts to rent allowance would lead to a new era of homelessness and a return to slum landlords and tenement conditions. I did not know how right I was at that stage because the real crisis was only unleashed in the years following that, reaching a crescendo in the past number of months.

The poverty of understanding of this crisis at all sorts of levels in Irish society is extraordinary. I was talking to a senior media figure whom I will not name because it would not be fair. I wanted to discuss the failure of the Irish media even to understand, never mind cover, the housing crisis in this country. At least this particular senior executive in one of the major broadcasting institutions admitted: "Most of the people who work with me and whom I know, might have mortgage difficulties but they would not know anything about being on a council housing list." Of course, that is the bloody truth. They do not understand because they have no experience of what it is like for hundreds of thousands of families who really are a silent, if not majority, a very significant silent minority, voiceless, but in desperate situations, whose suffering - there is no other word for it - is not articulated in a mainstream debate and much of the time until very recently was not articulated in debate in this House. Despite some of us screaming for a debate on this issue, it has taken until the last few months to get even a serious discussion about how bad this issue is and only now because the crisis is staring us in the face and because the worse predictions have come to pass.

When the rent caps were introduced the Minister for Social Protection, Deputy Burton, with a solemn face ridiculed those critics of that policy and she told us solemnly that rents would come down. Oh my God, how wrong can one be? It shows a fundamental poverty of analysis about how the housing market works and about the attitude of the private sector to housing. We still have the same poverty of analysis now when I hear the Taoiseach saying that we need 80,000 houses and that supply is the fundamental problem. I am sorry, the fundamental problem is not supply; it is part of the problem. Did we have supply between 2002 and 2008? We had massive supply, 70,000 to 90,000 houses a year. Did that in any way improve the housing list position or the level of homelessness? Not at all; it got worse during that period, even though we were building record numbers of houses.

It is a simple elementary fact and I have not heard one economist - so-called expert - in the past few weeks who understands that elementary point. Supply does not equal demand or supply does not rise to meet demand. That is textbook rubbish. In reality, supply rises to meet effective demand and demand where profits can be made. Effective demand is demand where people have the money to pay and that is where the market will orientate, towards people who can afford to pay hefty rents or hefty prices for property. It does not and will not orientate towards people who do not have enough money to put a roof over their head and who need low cost housing. I hear every day for the past week that incentivising private developers or even removing the Part V stipulation so that they do not need to provide social housing, will mean that prices will come down because they will provide so much housing. This is absolute rubbish. It is stuff one sees in leaving certificate economics where one line of demand meets one line of supply in the middle, in this beautiful equilibrium. This is rubbish and it is not the real world. It is textbook neoliberal dogma. That is not just my view, it is the experience of 2002 to 2008. How do we meet the need for housing of people who do not have the money to pay these high rents or to pay the massively rising property prices for housing in the Dublin property market? The answer is that the State provides subsidised housing. This is the only answer there has ever been. That is how we moved from the slums of the nineteenth century and the squalor associated with them, to some semblance of civilisation and equality in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Tragically, we have been rolling back on that since the 1980s with disastrous consequences, to the benefit of private developers and landlords, turning the property sector completely into a casino with disastrous consequences particularly when an economic recession hits.

Against this background this Bill facilitates evictions which is not wonderful, in my opinion. I agree there should be a streamlined process and that there needs to be fairness which there has not been. Cases were brought under the EU Convention on Human Rights because there was no fairness. Extraordinary draconian powers were in the hands of anti-social officers in local authorities who essentially, on the basis of their own personal discretion, could evict people. Sometimes this was justified and in many cases it was totally unjustified. There needs to be an independent fair process to adjudicate matters such as that and we need to examine the detail in this regard but it will not solve the problem.

The issue of incremental purchase of council houses is a good thing in itself, so long as these are replaced with new build of social housing, otherwise all that will happen is the existing stock of social housing will be run down and there will be problems stored up for the future. The housing assistance payment, HAP, is the one substantial provision in the Bill. At least this will, depending on the detail of the proposal, remove the ridiculous anomaly whereby local authorities in leasing arrangements with private landlords are paying way in excess of the rent caps which community welfare officers are allowed to pay. A person who is homeless or is threatened with homelessness goes to the community welfare officer who says he or she can only provide €1,000 a month for a three-bedroom house, when in south Dublin, one could not rent a box for that amount and would have to pay €1,300 or €1,400 a month.

The person is then sent to homeless services, which will send him or her to a hotel on the other side of Dublin or, failing that, he or she will be left to sleep in a car or on the sofa of a relative. At the same time, the local authority has entered into a crazy arrangement with landlords under which it pays rents of €1,300 and €1,400 per month. I cannot understand how these arrangements have been allowed to persist for so long. The legislation should at least remove this ridiculous anomaly and force councils to vary the rent caps, as Deputies on this side have argued. We must, however, see the detail before deciding if that is the case. Even if it addresses that issue, it will not solve the fundamental problem. Local authorities will become sitting ducks for landlords who want to jack up rents or pull out of current leasing arrangements. We know this will happen because some of them are already doing so.

While the legislation removes one anomaly and may also remove a second anomaly under which people who take up employment lose money, it is not sustainable because it does not resolve the fundamental problem. The only solution is to return to large-scale building of local authority houses. I do not accept the view that this cannot be done because of current economic constraints. We built tens of thousands of council houses in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s and 1970s and no one can tell me we cannot afford to do so now, especially as the alternative is to spend €750 million on rent allowance and leasing arrangements. This money pours into the pockets of landlords and down the drain. The alternative is to build council houses. I plead with the Government to start to do so.

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