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

I am reading the figures from the Minister. How can they be explained? From a total of 15,000 housing units next year, only 1,400 will be new council houses. That means 10% of the social housing that the Government has indicated it will deliver next year will be council housing, with slightly over 80%, taking into account the returned units, being sourced from the private sector. This, in conjunction with the housing assistance payment, HAP, is a wholesale move into the privatisation of social housing. The voluntary housing bodies, generally speaking, are decent organisations with decent people in the social housing area for the right reasons. Still and all, many people would prefer to be in council houses than in housing provided by the approved housing bodies. I bet that most of the 1,400 houses is not council housing but rather stock from approved bodies. In England, as the voluntary housing sector expanded at the expense of direct provision of social housing, it became big business as well. For-profit operators began to move to the voluntary housing sector and I can guarantee that will happen here too.

The Minister of State has challenged us on making these criticisms by asking us what we would do. I, along with most of the people making these contributions today, have been saying since the week we came in here what we would do. We have been saying it almost on a weekly basis for approximately four years. It is disingenuous to say we have not put our views forward but, for the record, I will do so again. The total cost of projects like the rental accommodation scheme or RAS, HAP and the various ways in which we subsidise private landlords and developers in the social housing sector is approximately €1 billion per year. That includes RAS, social leasing and rent allowance, and it is money going out and down the flipping drain. If we take 15 years, for example, to solve the problem, we could spend €15 billion on a serious emergency social housing programme that would build 20,000 or 30,000 social houses per year for the next five years. It would cost much money up-front but that would be recouped within ten or 15 years because every single council house built is money saved in the long term. That would equate to money not going out of the State coffers into the pockets of private landlords. It would be a sure-fire, guaranteed winner for State if we built directly provided council housing. We would own the asset and it would be much more secure accommodation for the tenants and so on. It would also generate money for the State through rental revenue.

Another big effect would be regulation of the housing market in general by keeping down property prices. If a tiny oligarchy of developers and vulture funds controls all the property, we are guaranteed bubbles and busts because we have no control over what they do. This can be counteracted with a big bank of social housing, which would act as a sort of deadening weight on property bubbles occurring in the first place. That would keep down the general level of property and rental costs. In the 1940s and 1950s, when the State had far less money than it does now, at least we understood that logic. When Ireland was virtually a Third World country, we built thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of council houses per year. How did people manage that? They knew it was a good investment. As the proportion of housing provided in any given year has become less public and more private, we have ended up where we now are, complete with bubbles and crashes. This idea would be an investment against future crises, not to mention saving the State money and, most importantly, dealing with the catastrophic housing crisis we now face.

The Minister of State might argue that we could not achieve that in a year or two. If the Government had listened when we argued for this in 2011, we would not be in the current mess. If the Government admitted that the housing list is a disaster and it messed it up but it would rectify it, even if people were not housed in a year, they could be housed in the next two to three years. That would at least give people hope. This does not even consider the construction work that would be generated, taking people off the live register and giving employment at a local level. All of this would provide hope and enthusiasm to people, who could believe that we are seriously dealing with the problem.

There would of course have to be temporary measures in the mean time and there is no good solution in this regard. That is the cumulative cost we are paying for the failure to get this right over the past 20 years. We should start now and recognise what we did in essentially abandoning the provision of council housing over the past 20 years. The process has worsened under this Government but it was a disaster under the last Government as well, when resources were reduced to a trickle. This was a major contributor to the property madness, as housing came to be seen as just a commodity on which to speculate rather than an essential element of society.

Even the economy will now pay a price. Government Deputies often see us as the bleeding heart liberals who want to do everything for everybody but who do not know how to pay for it. Those Deputies see themselves as the hard-headed pragmatists who really understand the economics of the issue. If we do not deal with the cost of accommodation, property and rental prices and the lack of affordable accommodation, there will be a serious problem even for the Government's beloved foreign direct investment. Even the multinationals know that people need affordable places in which to live, although they do not want to pay any higher taxes to provide them. Jesus Christ, I would not want to say that Guinness had particularly enlightened capitalists but even that company built social housing and understood that its workers, from whom they wished to profit, had to have somewhere to live, or else those people could not go to work the following day. The capitalists from the 19th century were more progressive than the gang of multinational vultures that we now have. They will not do it unless the Government indicates that housing must be provided for all sorts of reasons, including macroeconomic and humanitarian reasons. There is a basic right to housing and a decent, dignified existence for human beings, whether one argues from the bleeding heart liberal perspective or the hard-headed macroeconomic side.

Instead, with this Bill and the other measures it is taking, the Government is pretty much outsourcing the lot. That is going to be an absolute disaster.

That was a slight digression from the amendment, but the point about the amendment is that imposing this levy on local authorities will be a pressure for them to privatise, either directly by selling the land or indirectly by engaging in public private partnerships, which will effectively privatise it.

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