Seán Ó Fearghaíl (Kildare South, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Whoever wrote it down got it wrong, because they are two radically different areas.

In amendment No. 18 I am saying to the Minister that by not including voluntary housing in the Bill she is missing a golden opportunity to recognise that an injustice is being perpetrated on the tenants of voluntary housing associations. If their houses were built after 2010, they cannot buy their properties. The 2009 Act made provision for an incremental purchase scheme for local authority houses and for identified voluntary housing units. I do not know if any voluntary housing units were built after 2009. There were not many local authority units built. When I asked my local authority this morning how many houses had been sold in County Kildare under the incremental purchase scheme I was told "none".

We welcome the concept of a purchase scheme in principle. I was a great advocate of the old traditional tenant purchase scheme which had an element of discount and which people understood and used to great effect throughout the country. People got a local authority house, their circumstances improved, they bought the house, built onto it, raised their family and everybody was happy.

However, I believe approximately 20,000 units across the country were delivered by voluntary housing associations under the capital loan and subsidy scheme, CLSS. I am not referring to the capital assistance scheme, CAS, units and the specialised units that were built for people with disabilities, elderly people and so forth. There is a need to retain the ownership of those units with the voluntary bodies that built them. However, where the other voluntary housing associations are concerned, the people who were housed in those units had no other choice. In many instances they were recommended to the voluntary housing association by the local authority. They saw themselves as getting a house but they did not know at the time they were getting it that they were condemning themselves to an indefinite period of renting.

In Kildare we developed the voluntary sector as a self-help initiative. In some places in County Kildare there are locally based voluntary housing associations where the people came together to form the association. The association then went on to build houses on an agency basis for the county council. In the same estate there is a level of integration, where there are voluntary units and the units built for the county council on an agency basis. People can buy the county council houses but the people in the voluntary units who came from the same housing list and benefited from the same source of funding, which was 100% grant aid from the Department, cannot buy their houses.

One of the Minister's predecessors, former Deputy Michael Finneran, introduced the incremental purchase scheme.

Mrs. Thatcher, of whom I am no great admirer, delivered social housing in Britain by way of the voluntary housing associations, which is why Deputy Catherine Murphy is correct to say we must be careful to avoid a situation where the local authorities cease to be the housing agencies and we offload the entire responsibility onto voluntary housing associations. It may in some respects be a misnomer to describe them as voluntary given that they are large commercial enterprises in respect of which there has been a degree of empire building. These very large bodies which are themselves opposed to a tenant purchase scheme should not be allowed to deprive people of an opportunity to purchase their properties.

Amendment No. 18 asks that common sense prevail. It seeks to put in place a tenant purchase scheme to allow people to buy homes out in the same way as people who avail of local authority housing can do and to ring-fence the funding so that it all goes back in to provide further social housing locally or, in exceptional cases, to refurbish houses, should that be necessary.

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