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

I have thought about this since Committee Stage, and when the Bill is added together with the social housing strategy it would be fair to say it is something of a pincer movement to force the further privatisation of social housing. If local authorities are levied for a failure to develop lands in their ownership, and if they do not have the money to build social housing because the central government does not give it to them, they will either sell the land or be forced into arrangements which effectively privatise the land through public-private partnerships. They will have to do this to avoid the levies and get capital from the private sector. That is the plan. This dovetails with all of the other measures in the social housing strategy.

If announcements about housing solved the housing crisis we would have solved it in the past year, but when we look at the detail of the social housing strategy and start to parse through the numbers we see the pressure on the local authorities, to which this measure will add, to privatise land. When we look at the detail behind the targets for social housing 2020 strategy, we really begin to see that the strategy is the wholesale privatisation of social housing. Taking the social housing strategy for 2015 as a sample of what is coming between now and 2020, the response to one of our councillors who wrote to the Minister trying to get a breakdown was very illuminating. According to the reply, the Minister expects that 7,400 new social housing units will be provided in 2015, broken down as follows: 1,400 units will be built or acquired by local authorities and approved housing bodies; 3,000 will be under the social housing leasing initiative; 1,000 will be vacant local authority units which will be returned to use; and 2,000 will be new rental allowance scheme units. This amounts to 7,400 units. In addition, there will be 8,400 new housing assistance payments.

Out of a total of approximately 15,000, 2,000 plus 3,000 plus 8,400 will be from the private sector. The vast majority will be money going out to developers and landlords in the private sector. A tiny fraction of the big headline social housing commitment being made by the Government will be through the direct provision of local authority housing. The rest of it will be under various rental and leasing arrangements with private landlords and private developers, the very people to whom we have just sold all of these massive portfolios for a song. These vulture funds or speculators have benefited from the misery inflicted on the rest of us in terms of austerity, the cost of the crash and the cost of the bailout. These guys come in, buy the stuff for a song and will rent it back to the local authorities, sucking huge amounts of money on an annual basis out of the public coffers and into their swelling bank accounts. This, of course, also has the advantage of driving up rents and property prices because, if it were possible, it is an even smaller cartel than the previous cartel of developers and land bankers. We will have an even smaller golden circle of people controlling the vast majority of rental and commercial land and profit in the State.

This includes private rental and commercial property etc. It is an absolute pincer movement, a scam of unbelievable proportions, with which we will at an even more intense level do again what caused the last crash. The last lot in power made an absolute bags of it and reduced social housing provision to a trickle but this Government is, more or less, closing it down. That was the announced policy in July 2011, when it was publicly indicated that direct social housing provision would be stopped. Even with the slight reversal of that at the rhetorical level, in reality the Government is continuing along that line.

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