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

I thank the Deputy. While we support many aspects of the Bill and love the Minister of State for introducing them, I am appalled to find a provision that effectively excludes people who are in receipt of the housing assistance payment, HAP, from local authority housing waiting lists. The HAP is a positive development and the Minister of State is to be commended for integrating responsibility for the totality of housing provision in local authorities. It makes sense to give them responsibility for dealing with the old rent subsidy and the change in title to "HAP" is understandable, but the Minister of State will need to engage forcefully with county and city managers to ensure they invest the necessary resources in housing departments to operate this system. In the past two decades, in particular, housing provision at local authority level was not given the priority it deserved or warranted. When substantial funding was available for construction programmes, sufficient personnel were not allocated to housing departments to allow them to deliver on these programmes. The HAP is a good idea and the Minister of State is moving in the right direction, but she needs to engage with county and city managers to ensure they provide the necessary personnel to allow the system to work effectively.

It is incomprehensible that, under this section of the Bill, receipt of the HAP means someone has had his or her housing needs met. A couple of times my local authority has received a message from the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government to the effect that, when someone receives a rental accommodation scheme, RAS, payment, enters temporary RAS accommodation or avails of a long-term leasing arrangement through a voluntary housing association, his or her housing need should be deemed to have been met and, consequently, he or she should be removed from its waiting list. The Department has also told my local authority that, after responsibility for the HAP has transferred to it and the scheme has become operational, those in receipt of it should be deemed to have had their housing needs met.

There are 90,000 plus people on waiting lists, but the number could be as high as 100,000. Of these, 77,000 are in receipt of rent allowance. As the HAP system is developed and rolled out across the country, they will be moved to it from the rent subsidy scheme.

I am sure the Minister will correct me if I am wrong, but they will then be deemed to have had their housing need met. That is appalling beyond belief. The Minister is setting about "disappearing" 70,000 people into the ether. As Minister of State with responsibility for housing, she will get great plaudits for having reduced the housing list - she will virtually wipe it out - but people's need will continue. I am very concerned that people will be condemned to an indefinite period of living in temporary accommodation where the fulfilment of their needs is at the whim of private landlords who can decide to increase the rent, move them out if they will not pay the increased rent, sell the property or whatever. That was never the tradition in this country. Even in the worst of times we allocated money for the construction of local authority housing. We introduced purchase schemes which allowed people to build. We introduced the rent subsidy scheme, which is costing approximately €500 million, effectively as an interim measure between homelessness and local authority housing. The Taoiseach referred to the NESC report in the House during the week. He said we would no longer have the opportunity or be in a position to provide the sort of funding for social housing that we have provided in the past and that we need to have a conversation about what we are going to do. This Fine Gael-led Government is more right wing than we have seen in many years, but the last thing the Irish people would have expected is that the Labour Party would be complicit in bringing forward a proposal that effectively seeks to deprive people of the opportunity to continue to be on a local authority housing waiting list.

I believe the Minister of State said in committee and elsewhere that it is her intention that people should be able to move from the RAS, long-term leasing or the HAP, but if there is no longer a list, and the local authorities operate a scheme of letting priorities which is based primarily on the length of time one has spent on the waiting list, the people who avail, through necessity, of these temporary measures - RAS, which is five years, long-term leasing, which is ten or more years, or the HAP, which inevitably will be short-term - are depriving themselves of the opportunity of a long-term solution into the future.

This legislation makes no sense. It is not good legislation and it will be enormously detrimental to Irish society, condemning many people to remain in a situation in which they are living in uncertainty and their ability to avail of educational, employment and other opportunities is greatly reduced. This legislation, more than any other legislation that I have seen in my period in this House, effectively widens the gap between rich and poor and creates a situation in which the poor will be made much poorer.

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