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

Section 37 is nothing less than a counter-revolution in the provision of social housing. It is the most retrograde and backward step imaginable in that it attempts to turn what it is a temporary necessity owing to the failure of Governments, including the previous one, to provide council housing into a permanent measure and to institutionalise the outsourcing and privatisation of social housing to the private sector. That is appalling. Everything else that the Government says or claims it proposes to do to try to address the current crisis is undermined and undone by this measure. This takes us to a place that the late Margaret Thatcher could only have dreamed of in terms of wholesale, full-scale privatisation of social housing.

This section, combined with the Minister of State's earlier resistance to giving a firm commitment to reinvest all of the proceeds from tenant purchases back into the provision of social housing and the Government's cries that it does not have the money to engage in large-scale direct provision of council housing, which is necessary - and is what the Minister of State has said she would favour in an ideal world but says we cannot afford - is a recipe for full-scale privatisation of housing. The effective privatisation of the housing market by Fianna Fáil, although not set down in legal statute, is what created the ingredients for the current crisis, the property bubble and the crash that almost destroyed our economy, for which we are now paying a terrible price. Fianna Fáil did it effectively and this Government is now institutionalising what it did effectively and making it law. Accommodation owned by a private landlord and subject to a housing assistance payment arrangement with the council is not social housing.

Apart from the utterly retrograde, privatising thrust of this section, it is not going to work. It indicates a failure to grasp what is currently going on. I am sure the Minister of State is in contact with the local authorities on this issue, which makes it more difficult to understand the reason she would put this in legislation. Everybody knows and is finally acknowledging that private landlords are walking away. All of the evidence suggests that even those who have not walked away could walk at any time because they can command higher rents elsewhere. How can the Minister of State possibly say that an arrangement between a private landlord and a local authority, from which arrangement a landlord can walk at any time if it is possible for him or her to make more money elsewhere, represents a permanent solution to people's housing need? It does not, yet this Bill says it does. The Bill states that the provision of social housing assistance under the relevant Part shall be deemed to be an appropriate form of social housing support. It is not. I do not know how the Minister of State can claim it is when she has acknowledged that these types of arrangement are temporary. In response to questions during the past year on the need to raise the rent caps, the Minister, Deputy Burton, rightly said, although somewhat disingenuously, that we cannot do that because we do not want to continue to pour money into the pockets of private landlords. We agree. The only way to avoid doing that is to provide social housing, but what the Minister of State is proposing to do is to institutionalise the arrangement through which we pour money into the pockets of private landlords and call that permanent social housing provision. It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that this is a recipe for a return to slum landlordism.

While some of the landlords engaged in RAS arrangements are good, reasonable and so on, others are not. Some of the accommodation is sub-standard and there are huge problems in terms of who is directly in charge of ensuring that accommodation is up to standard. While tenants can call in the environmental health officer or local authority in respect of housing that is unsuitable, many are afraid to do so because if they do their landlord will pull out of the RAS arrangement, leaving them homeless. The council would then have a housing obligation to those people which it could not fulfil, because it currently cannot fulfil it for anybody, even those in the most dire of circumstances.

One of the justifications for the housing assistance payment is to ensure that people in receipt of rent allowance are not disincentivised from working, which is positive. Last Thursday, along with dozens of families who are either homeless, threatened with homelessness or on the housing list for up to 16 years, I slept in a sleeping bag outside Dún Loaghaire-Rathdown County Council. At 7 a.m. the following morning, approximately half of the people there left to go to work. Some of these people are homeless but they work. The homeless are the people who are working. They are not just people who are dependant on social welfare; some are on low incomes, in part-time jobs and so on.

This provision will not address the crisis. In fact, it is institutionalising the problem that produced the crisis in the first instance - namely, dependance on the private sector. All that is required is that one word be changed to acknowledge that this is a temporary measure, so that anybody who is forced into an arrangement which is temporary and is not appropriate or suitable has the comfort of knowing that while housing is currently not available, they are entitled to a council house and the authority is moving to provide them with those houses. That is what we need. This has to be changed; otherwise, the Bill cannot be supported. If it is not changed, everything else in the Bill becomes decorative and what we will actually have is a counter-revolution in social housing of which the late Margaret Thatcher would be proud.

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