Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

In principle, the Social Democrats support the linking of rents to the consumer price index. Unfortunately, we are all too well aware of the significant escalation in rents. It is a point I raised right through the lifetime of the previous Dáil. It is particularly evident in large urban centres. Linking rents to the consumer price index is a good idea in theory. However, we cannot presuppose that the current levels of rents are affordable to begin with.

Renting is now the most expensive but the least secure of tenure types. The number of people renting has doubled over the past ten years. It is a whole area which requires a policy in its own right. Too often we have seen policy responses being just legislation when, in fact, it needs to be multifaceted. The Private Residential Tenancies Board requires to be significantly beefed up.

The crisis was evident several years ago and I was certainly raising it in 2012 at the environment committee. We were continually told that if there was a reduction in rent assistance, it would drive rents down, despite what we were seeing in our own areas. This crisis has been growing over the past several years. Last year in my area, rent for a three-bedroom house was €900. This year, it is €1,300. This is for no good reason other than the market is dictating the price. There has to be some mechanism of containing that.

Creating a viable rental sector is about far more than affordability, although it is of critical importance. It also requires consideration of issues such as security of tenure and rights for both landlords and tenants. There is more to be done about these. It is certainly the number one issue in my constituency office, and was the case over the lifetime of the past Dáil. I suspect this was also the case for most Deputies, particularly in urban and suburban areas.

When people ask me for advice about a tenancy dispute, I tell them to go to the Private Residential Tenancies Board. However, it will take about a year to have a dispute dealt with, meaning I have to give them that advice with a health warning. We need to have a sector which can be regulated and that has to be part of the solution.

At various stages, people will want to choose renting as an option. For some people, it is the only option but for others, it is a desired option. That is how it is in other European countries and in American cities. How do we get to a point where we have renting as an option? One cannot do so without security of tenure or affordability.

I support the idea of having large socially mixed estates where one is essentially building communities with mixed tenure types and different sizes of accommodation which will allow people to move up and down over their lifetime. That is the way to go. We have to deal with the crisis at this stage. One element of the crisis that is hard to understand is that there are 200,000 vacant houses around the country. The housing associations have been saying for the past several years that we have to find ways of reducing the level of vacancy.

For example, the level of vacancy in this city is about 8%. To reduce that to 4% would provide in the region of 20,000 houses, which would have an immediate impact on rents because the supply-side issue would be dealt with. There are reasons that people are not offering their houses for rent, some being simple things like the impediment created by the fair deal scheme. These are the kinds of things that need to be looked at in the immediate term.

We need a major scaling up of local authority building. When we met the Minister recently, we pointed out there is a reason that the local authorities are slow. We made the point that there needs to be a delivery aspect to the Housing Finance Agency, which would go in and project-manage the large new developments which might involve housing from the tier 3 housing associations, local authority houses or private houses. It requires to be managed so there needs to be that kind of intervention in the market. Even though this would scale up the local authority build, I do not think we should go back to the point where there is just one house type or tenure type in an area. This did not work in the past in some areas where very large housing estates were built and the only thing they had in common was that they were economically less well-off than other areas. A different response is needed if we are not to create problems later on.

We support the Bill in principle, although we do not see it as a silver bullet. It is one of a very large number of things that need to be done. It will be important that we not just have a report at the end of this week from the Minister because we need that report turned into action across a range of different responses. Obviously, limiting rent increases and linking them to the consumer price index is a realistic part of a bigger package.

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