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

They attack us too. Anyway, there were reports to that effect. Even if we accept that it was a legitimate attempt to curtail the disproportionate benefits that might accrue to the people earning in excess of €100,000 per year that would have resulted from cutting the top rate of tax, it did not do enough in that regard because the people earning over €70,000 and certainly those earning over €100,000 and €125,000 still got multiples of what was given to people who are on the poverty line, the working poor and those on or under the average industrial wage. That is not fair. Arguably, it would not be fair under any circumstances but it is most certainly not fair when we know that the coterie of people between the average industrial wage and those on the poverty line cannot pay their bills at the moment. They are struggling to pay their bills. They are making cruel choices between which bills to pay, paying off debts and trying to keep a roof over their heads, although in many cases they are unable to put a roof over their heads, resulting in a disastrous housing and homelessness crisis.

There are other things; it is not only about income tax. When we are considering social protection we should examine other measures in the budget, although they are often treated separately. A total of €95 million was given in corporate tax breaks. In the context of the overall arithmetic of the budget it does not seem like much, but €95 million would have meant a great deal to the people on social welfare or the working poor in terms of providing a greater give-back rather than giving more corporate tax breaks to people who already pay some of the lowest levels of tax on profits anywhere in the advanced industrial world. How do we justify that? These are serious questions that we must answer.

All of this is following the changes between 2008 and 2015, when those dependent on social welfare lost 12.5% of their income and the working poor lost 11.3% of their income. I still do not fully understand the Minister's reference to statistics indicating how we are doing okay on the international poverty comparisons. I simply do not get it. I suppose the Minister is getting her figures somewhere and I imagine they are from reputable organisations, but UNICEF and Social Justice Ireland are reputable too and they are not making it up. I am keen to know how these things square up. UNICEF stated that 28% of the children in this country are living in poverty. Is UNICEF wrong? Is this true or not true? My experience and the empirical evidence - I doubt if the experience of the Minister of State is much different given his constituency with Pearse Street, Ringsend, the south inner city and so on - suggests many people are in deep trouble. The term "poverty" is no exaggeration to describe the situation that many people are in. They are unable to cope, they do not know whether they can afford a roof over their heads. All of these things are realities and the UNICEF statistics seem to bear them out.

Another important point in the UNICEF report is that despite the global recession some countries have actually reduced child poverty while other countries have not. Shamefully, according to UNICEF, we are in the group that has not and I would like an explanation for that. Some 18 countries have seen a reduction in child poverty since 2008 while there were increases in child poverty in the remaining 23 countries analysed. We are among the remaining group of 23 countries. This is what UNICEF has said. Has UNICEF got it wrong? If that is what the Government maintains and if it believes the UNICEF statement is not true then I would like to hear it. The research also shows that the proportion of children up to the age of 17 years living in jobless households nearly doubled in Portugal and Spain. The corresponding figure almost tripled in Denmark, but the largest absolute increases of above 5% were in Ireland, Bulgaria, Greece and Spain. We are in the worst place in terms of the international league table when it comes to child poverty and failing to reduce it. In fact we are seeing it increase along with the number of young people living in jobless households.

All of these things have deteriorated while, notwithstanding the recession, other countries have managed to insulate the poorest sections of society from the economic damage. That is presumably because they have put the costs a little bit more on those that could actually afford them. That is the conclusion I draw.

I do not expect the Minister or Minister of State to comment in detail on the proposal now, but I expect them to take it seriously at least when there are reports showing a staggering concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny group of people. I would like to hear from the Government, but in particular from the Labour Party, that this will be given serious consideration in the context of a report that shows 5% of the population have more than 40% of the wealth, or close to €250 billion. This is from the Credit Suisse global wealth report produced in April 2014. The Minister should look at this shocking report. I acknowledge that these are estimates, but they are very credible ones produced by a wealth asset management company with an interest in knowing where wealth is, how much countries have and how it is distributed in order to punt the information to wealthy investors around the world. The people who produced the global wealth report tend to try to obtain the best and most accurate information and have detailed their methodology in the foreword.

The figures show that the staggering wealth inequality here is on a par with what is happening in most of the rest of the advanced industrial world. These staggering gaps in the distribution of wealth are consistent across the advanced industrial countries. It is a shame not just for Ireland but for the whole world that one can have this concentration of wealth. Anyone who is interested in equality, social protection, fairness and all that kind of stuff must take this seriously and address it and not tell us that it is too complicated to find out where the wealth is. The Department of Social Protection will really put someone through the ringer when it comes to means testing but it appears things are different when it comes to the wealthy.

My final point is on rent supplement and all the rest of it. The Minister says the Government has moved from a failed position of outsourcing and privatising the provision of social and affordable housing as pursued over recent years - vigorously so by Fianna Fáil with disastrous consequences. Fianna Fáil effectively privatised the housing market and we went from a situation where in the 1950s and 1960s a very significant proportion of any housing built in any one year was built by the State. That meant there was an adequate stock of affordable subsidised housing while acting as a regulatory ballast on the overall housing market. That continued until the 1970s and was abandoned in the Thatcherite era of the 1980s with disastrous consequences.

The privatisation of the housing market led to the bubble because it put all the control in the hands of developers and banks who did not give a damn about affordability, the stability of the housing market and the provision of social housing. There is no doubt that the neo-liberals in the last Government and around the world pursued that with disastrous consequences. People should be honest about this stuff. When the current Government took office in 2011, it decided to continue down the same road and produced a document in July that year which stated that the direct provision of social housing was a thing of the past. It said we would not do it any more and that stuff would be outsourced. The document was produced by the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government. I remember putting out a press statement at the time to say it was a disaster. The idea of HAPS was already in the pipeline in that document. While the term "HAPS" was not used, a reference was made to a move to housing support as opposed to direct housing provision as the Government said it did not have the money to build social housing any more.

This has led to the claim the Minister just made when she said that her Department provides 70,000 homes. This is a ludicrous claim, but it follows from a policy set out in 2011 and still pursued through the HAP scheme which is saying that housing assistance payments and recategorising people on rent allowance is the same as providing them with a council house. That is not going to fly. The Minister of State knows that. If the Minister and Minister of State wanted to argue that they could not do anything else as the scale of the problem is too difficult, it would at least be an honest answer. I would not accept it, but it would at least be honest. To say that a housing assistance payment or rent allowance is the provision of a home is not correct, however. It is not the same.

It is not secure and there is no pathway to be able to buy the house in the end. One is at the prey of a landlord who can pull out of a HAPS or RAS agreement at any time. There is a range of differences in terms of responsibility for maintenance and the demarcation lines between landlords, tenants and the local authorities. There is a whole range of problems. If this is what we are now describing as social housing, the quality of it will be lower, there will be major problems in terms of maintenance and we will be prey to landlords and market rents. It is not the same and it is not the answer and we should not pretend otherwise.

It sounds good on the face of it to refer to 110,000 social housing units being provided by 2020, but 75,000 of those are referable to the reclassification of people currently on rent allowance who will stay exactly where they are in the private rented sector if landlords will sign up. Many landlords will not, which is a problem we will discover in a year or two. In relation to the other 35,000 units, we have not had a breakdown. We know it will be a mixture of public private partnership arrangements, leasing arrangements, refurbishments and some direct builds. How much and by who? Will it be the voluntary housing associations? How much will be leasing arrangements and what are these public private partnerships? How do we know they will be different from the public private partnerships that collapsed the last time? How do we know they will not be worse? There is a great deal of detail which we have not even had a chance to discuss here.

There is also the issue of the rent caps. Since the Government's document was published, we have not had a debate on that, which I find a bit odd. The Taoiseach indicated that after the housing forum tomorrow there might be a discussion of the matter next week. I hope that can be confirmed and that we will find out the detail and have a chance to go through this stuff. I am not happy with it nor are many of the housing agencies.

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