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

I do not know where to start given the mess we are in. Unless we grasp how bad the situation is, we cannot even judge the legislation in any meaningful way. We must grasp the scale of the problem we face and the absolute certainty that if things remain the same, the situation will be much worse next year and in the coming years. Nothing in the legislation or in what the Government has announced in the past year, since it finally admitted there is a crisis, will address the fact that the situation will be worse in a year's time and even worse still in four or five years’ time. That seems difficult to imagine when one considers how bad the situation is now, even with all the Government’s trumpeting of the great plans, proposals and new legislation in the past year or so.

I do not know where to start, but let me outline a few facts which bear out what I have said. There are 96,000 people on the housing list. In 2008 a total of 4,900 council houses were built. In 2013 the total number of council houses built was 293. The year 2008 was a disaster in terms of social housing. The lists were getting longer and had been getting longer in the years prior to 2008. Even when we had a boom in the construction industry and record levels of private sector construction, the housing lists were getting longer and longer. That puts to bed the utterly insane notion behind this Bill, namely, that if we stimulate, induce, cajole or bribe the private developers to build again, that it will solve the problem. It will not. How do we know that? We know that because it did not solve the problem during the greatest private sector construction boom in the history of the State. The housing crisis got worse during that time.

Prices increased, rents increased, housing lists got longer and the number of homeless people increased. The legislation is built on a fundamentally misguided notion that stimulating the private sector will solve the problem. Sorry, it will not even begin to. The Government is asking people who built houses to make profits to provide housing for people who do not have enough money to make profits for private landlords or developers. This is the point of social and affordable housing. They do not have the money to make someone in the private sector rich. They need subsidised housing, given that their income is not sufficient to make some landlord or developer a profit. If the Minister of State is asking the same landlords and developers to deal with a crisis in which hundreds of thousands of families do not have enough income to put a roof over their heads by buying it or by paying inflated private sector rents which have gone through the stratosphere, he is deluding himself. It is absolute and utter nonsense.

I slightly disagree with Deputy Stanley's argument that the Part V affordable and social housing scheme worked for us. It did not work. The affordable housing scheme was a disaster. Given that people who bought so-called affordable housing ended up in negative equity after the crash, it turned out not to be affordable at all. It was a massive albatross around their necks. The Part V scheme did not deliver anything like enough housing to make any impact on lists that continued to grow longer.

It was estimated that we needed 18,000 housing units per year between 2011 and 2021. Given that we are already four years behind on this target, we need approximately 30,000 units per year to make any impact on an absolute disaster. In Dublin, 8,000 houses have been needed per year since 2011, whereas only 1,360 were delivered in 2013. Figures that came out this week showed that 10,000 extra people per month are entering the private rented sector. The numbers of people in private rented accommodation have doubled since 2013, which means people on higher incomes are crowding out those on lower incomes in so far as some of them can afford the inflated prices. A catastrophe is unfolding. How will we address it?

Given that the private sector did not address the housing problem during the boom period, the idea that they will do it now, when banks are afraid to lend money and the developers are interested only in making profits, is nonsense. The Government, in the Bill, is attempting to induce the landlords and developers further by cutting down the obligation to provide social housing. Even during the boom they fought to get out of their obligations by giving over cash and even argued about the amount of cash and housing and where they would give it. They fought it at every hand's turn, and our answer is to get down on our knees even further by reducing their obligation to deliver social housing.

There will be very concrete consequences. In my area, there is a second phase of a NAMA development in which the same private developers who got us into the mess are back running it under the auspices of NAMA. Under the legislation, in a situation in which our housing list is growing by 1,200 per year, a development will happen in which we would have got 20% but will now get only 10%. The development contribution the developers must give to the council will be reduced. The very developers who got us into the mess will be put back in business and what they will deliver in terms of a social dividend for social housing for the huge numbers on the list will be even less and the contribution in development levies will be less. It is a flipping disgrace. There is constant pandering to and reliance on the private sector.

The Clerys debacle is linked to this. The person who has just bought Clerys was in NAMA. I refer to Deirdre Foley of D2 Private. D2 Private was given a massive write-down on money it owed to NAMA, and the same people have been resurrected and have managed to scrabble together money to buy Clerys and put all those workers, some of whom had been there for 30 or 40 years, out of work. This is urban regeneration. People whose massive loans were discounted by NAMA – in other words by the public – are back in business, have bought Clerys and workers have been shoved out the door with nothing.

We need a major emergency, State-led housing programme and we need the State to build tens of thousands of houses. We cannot hope or wait for the private sector to do it. It will not, no matter how much the Minister tries to induce it. This means we must get the capital investment to do it. It is a priority. Even today’s macro-financial review by the Central Bank says rising rents and property prices and what is happening in the residential and commercial property sectors constitutes a major macroeconomic domestic threat to the entire economy. If we cannot house people, the economy cannot function. The cost for families, children, the economy and the future is dire. I am sorry to say it, and I wish I could say otherwise, but the Bill is rubbish. It is the sort of rubbish that got us into the mess before and we need to shift policy radically towards a State-led emergency public housing programme and the immediate introduction of rent controls.

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