Joan Collins (Dublin South Central, United Left) | Oireachtas source

I support this motion. We have listened to the Government time and again roll out different figures or the same figures to give the impression that more money is going to housing in this country. The Minister, Deputy Alan Kelly, is a good example of the Labour Party's role in the Government. For months he has huffed, puffed and generally made a great deal of noise but then he quietly rolled over with regard to the rent caps. That is abhorrent, in view of what people need at present to resolve this issue.

Why do we have a housing crisis? One need not be an expert to understand the reason. The failure to build and maintain an adequate supply of good quality social housing is the key factor. That has been the failure of both the previous and the current Governments. When I was a member of Dublin City Council in 2010 and 2011, I tabled an emergency motion regarding NAMA handing over properties. We had a housing crisis then at that level. A member of the Labour Party, Deputy Eric Byrne, produced a leaflet in 2010 stating that Dublin was in the grip of a housing emergency. In the leaflet he said that his motion in Dublin City Council to declare a housing emergency was an attempt to shock the then Government into taking action. He is now a Member of this House and he is not prepared to stand and shout that there is a housing emergency in the country.

The crisis is the result of decisions taken at Government and local authority levels effectively to abandon social housing provision and to rely on the private sector, developers, builders and landlords. It is a disastrous policy failure that must be reversed. However, all the Minister offers is more of the same. We must build 100,000 social housing units over the next ten years. The most effective way to do that is by establishing a national housing agency and declaring a housing emergency to respond to the humanitarian crisis facing people. The Government should accept this demand and utilise it to get the funding that is required. A national housing agency would bring together and oversee NAMA and local authorities and would mobilise existing resources in terms of land, existing housing units that are vacant and suitable and, crucially, would be able to borrow to fund a programme for directly building social housing.

This would be far cheaper than relying on the private sector, which the Government is hoping will build 75% of social housing units. It will not do that. In addition, there is no guarantee that the private sector will meet the targets the Government has set. Only 20 social housing units were built in the first six months of this year. The Minister is confident that this will increase to 200 over next year. We need 100,000, not 200 in the next year.

Many Members on this side of the House gave a cautious welcome to the changes in the 2000 Act to remove the ability of developers to make payments to local authorities in lieu of providing units for social housing. The point was made by a Labour Party backbencher that the Fianna Fáil Government, and I have many issues with Fianna Fáil and the last Government, allowed developers to pay for the housing rather than offer the houses for social housing. It did not; the local authorities did that. There was a provision in that Act to permit that and the local authority housing management allowed it to happen. It should never have done so. The councils at the time should have kicked up murder about it but the Labour Party and Fine Gael in the councils did not do so.

I do not know why it was necessary to reduce the requirement from 20% to 10%. That should be reversed.

There is an urgent need for social housing. Where is the logic in reducing the obligation on developers to provide social housing in developments by 50%? I do not know why the threshold is to be increased for developments from four units to nine. Where is the logic to that? That change should be reversed. I also want to raise the issue of the amendments proposed to section 34 of the Bill, which, I understand, will allow a developer to avoid the obligation to provide social housing units to a local authority if that developer agrees to rent out the units. That should not be there because all the housing should be designated as social housing. I have supported the concept of a vacant site levy for a long time but, again, I question why it is to be set at such a low level of 3%.

We must put in place the necessary short-term measures to deal with the escalating problem of homelessness, which is now affecting 80 families each week in Dublin alone. The point was made on the other side of the House about how that is affecting the mental health of families, both adults and children. This is going to be a huge problem. Again, the reasons are clear. Landlords are raising rents or exiting the market. The question of rising rents should have been dealt with by a temporary rent cap, which would have been achieved by temporarily linking rents to the consumer price index while bringing in a more long-term solution by regulating rents to make them affordable. The so-called rent certainty the Government has introduced is the certainty that rents will rise.

In the context of the Minister of State's point about the Residential Tenancies Act, the two key requirements were not mentioned. The first is to change the Act so that when properties are sold, this will be done with tenants in situ. This is done with commercial property, so why is it not being done with housing? The second requirement is to provide greater security for tenants by raising the period to a minimum of at least ten years. On another point, the credit unions are willing to offer €2 billion but the Government has not taken them up on it. That could be used to build nearly 12,000 houses.

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