Jan O'Sullivan (Limerick City, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the fact the Government has published its action plan for housing and homelessness and that is has done so ahead of time, and also that it has taken on board many of the recommendations of the Oireachtas committee, although, as has been pointed out, not all of the recommendations in full and not all of the recommendations that were made. Nevertheless, it is welcome that the action plan has been published and that it has five pillars which are designed to address what is a very serious problem.

I am concerned at what the plan does not contain and whether it can break the logjam that halted construction after the economic collapse of 2008. That is the challenge. People who are homeless, or are at risk of becoming homeless, need the plan to work. I wish it success because it is the most important issue and it needs immediate and effective action.

The biggest issue staring us all in the face is the need for housing at a time when there are zoned sites available. However, hardly anyone is building, apart from one-off houses in the countryside to which the Minister referred at the launch of the plan this morning. If it is cost-effective to build one-off houses, why is it not cost-effective to build multi-unit developments with the economies of scale attached to building more than one unit, especially given the demand that is building up in the cities? We are constantly being told by the private sector that it is not cost-effective to build, yet people are building one-off houses in the countryside. Therefore, those protestations must be challenged. I agree incentives should be provided, and some were announced today, such as the upfront payment for Part V units and making publicly owned land available for private housing to be built for profit. I agree with the Minister and others who have said that a social mix is desirable. It is good that publicly owned land will be made available for social and affordable housing, but it will also be made available for private development and presumably for profit. I agree with Deputy Ó Broin that there needs to be some public payback for that. While I agree with the principle that we need a social mix of housing, there must be some reward to local authorities where publicly owned land is being used for private profit. We must learn from the mistakes of the past whereby huge swathes of public housing are in one part of the city and other parts are entirely composed of private housing. The Minister cited Cork as an example.

There is also a pressing need to have disincentives to the hoarding of land and sites until they become more profitable. While I agree that we need to provide carrots to get the private sector to build, we also need sticks to ensure it does not sit on land to make a greater profit at a later stage. While the Minister answered questions on the plan this morning, he specifically said he is concerned that investment funds are buying up zoned land. I share the Minister’s concern. The only purpose I can see for buying zoned land is that one can hold on to it for some time to make a profit. The Minister must provide a strong deterrent to the hoarding of land for future profit.

The Labour Party put forward proposals in the Social Housing Bill yesterday. I hope the Minister will look at the proposals contained in the Bill, one of which is the implementation of the Kenny report and other of which is to bring forward the vacant sites levy. I accept the Minister said this morning that he would bring forward the vacant sites levy as soon as he legally could, but he should keep the matter under review because it is not planned to introduce it until 2018 and I believe it could be brought forward earlier. These two measures would provide the necessary deterrent to the hoarding of land.

Our Bill proposes the implementation of the recommendations of the Kenny report which, as we know, was published more than 40 years ago. An all-party commission on the Constitution in 2004 found that it was not contrary to the Constitution. I was a member of that committee. The Kenny report proposes that land acquired for the purpose of building houses through compulsory purchase orders, CPOs, would only have its current value plus 25%. In other words, one could not sit on the land and then make a profit by having it rezoned for housing.

A second proposal of our Bill is that the remit of NAMA be broadened and the organisation rebranded as the national housing development and finance agency. I know there are a number of measures proposed regarding the Housing Agency, for example, and the NTMA and others being part of the solution. However, we believe that NAMA could be a much greater part of the solution if its focus were changed and if its considerable monetary resources and expertise were used for the provision of housing, whether social or private.

We also propose measures to professionalise the landlord sector. Again, there are references to this in the housing strategy, but I believe that genuine measures could be introduced in this regard. There is a professionalised landlord sector in other European countries that provides stable, affordable rented accommodation but we do not really have that in this country, and we need more measures in this regard.

The fourth measure in our Bill I wish to highlight - I acknowledge that Sinn Féin has also proposed it - is the linking of rent to the consumer price index. We published all these measures about a month ago in a draft Bill, which we have added to, and we published the full Bill yesterday.

The Government is not proposing any specific actions regarding any of these four measures and others that we have published. We in opposition want to be constructive but we also hope that the Government will seriously consider measures presented by the Opposition.

We also urgently need more measures to give security to those privately renting. Some measures in the housing strategy will give some protection for tenants, such as, for example, where houses are being sold, that tenants stay in their homes. The Minister has announced that in large developments there will be protections. I have not seen any measures that would protect, say, the person who is in an individual apartment or whose landlord owns only a small number of properties. The majority of people privately renting are in those kinds of situations where the landlord does not own a very large number of properties in any one development. More security of tenure is required. Again, I know the Minister has said that there will be a plan later in the year in this regard, but a number of measures need to be taken in this area because people in the private rented sector face a great deal of insecurity.

I welcome increased funding for construction of social housing, building on the €3.1 billion provided by the former Minister, Deputy Alan Kelly, in the strategy he announced in November 2014. It is important to note the amended amount of €5.35 billion and, again, Deputy Ó Broin has pursued the numbers surrounding this issue. However, the Minister's plan goes up to 2021, whereas the plan of the former Minister, Deputy Alan Kelly, went up to 2020. I know that they are both six-year periods, but there was very little money available to spend in the first year of the plan of the former Minister, Deputy Alan Kelly. Fair is fair, and we must give credit to the former Minister. When I was in that Department, there was no money, and any bit of money we had we put into voids and bringing local authority houses back into use. That was effectively spent certainly in some local authorities, and I would cite Fingal as a particularly good one, but there was hardly any money to spend on the construction of houses. That money is now becoming available because the economy has been fixed, so we need to ensure it is spent, and spent effectively, but I do welcome the additional money.

There will be real challenges in getting the money spent. That will be the real test of the success of the plan. Money allocated to local authorities for social housing gets turned into actual houses at a snail's pace. I highlighted a hole in the ground in my city last week. I had allocated the money to housing there when I was Minister of State with responsibility for housing and planning. We had been given a commitment and I had it in writing that the houses would be built by April 2016, but it is still a hole in the ground. I am not hitting out at my local authority in particular because I know there are similar situations throughout the country.

We need to get rid of these obstacles and logjams. The matter will not be addressed simply by fast-tracking the planning process. If one considers Part VIII, for example, it is only an eight-week process plus possibly another four weeks if additional information is asked, so that is not the problem. I have some concerns about tampering with the planning process to address the issue of the slow pace of build because that is not where the problem is. The problem surrounds getting the money, getting to the planning process and then getting the construction done. The Minister needs to focus on that area. I point to the Minister of State sitting beside him because we were together in the Department of Education and Skills. Schools can be built relatively quickly, and I think I saw the Minister of State, Deputy English, on a television programme talking about that. There are examples in the Department of Education and Skills, both in my time and that of other Ministers, of our being able to build schools. One allocates money and the school or classrooms or whatever is built in a relatively short time. There are real issues to be addressed in this regard, and I hope we can get rid of those logjams.

In the time that is left to me I want to refer to a few other matters. I agree that student housing is referenced in the strategy but it needs much more specific proposals. Anything I saw in the plan was, I believe, there already. On the issue of homelessness, which is very important, I fully support the proposals of the Department of Children and Youth Affairs and the involvement of the Minister, Deputy Zappone, in supporting children and simple things like transportation. The cost of travelling was identified, along with the need to get to school, to have preschool facilities and to have the school completion programme available to these young people. They are extremely vulnerable and protection policies need to be in place to ensure these children are not exposed to any risk. These measures are very important, but getting the families into homes is the real solution, and that must be the focus.

I support the Housing First proposals and note that there is a proposal to expand them. I have some experience of this as well and was at a conference in Limerick two weeks ago on Housing First. It is about giving people a home, taking them as they are, whether they are addicted to drugs or have mental health issues or whatever, putting them in a home and giving them the wraparound 24-hour support they need to stay in that home. When it is explained to private landlords that such support is available, that the housing association working with those people will deal with the paying of the rent, and the kinds of supports that are in place, it should be attractive to landlords as well. It is a model that works and has been shown to work in other parts of the world, so I urge that that programme be supported, continued and expanded.

There are a large number of measures in the plan. There is a need for more strategic focus, particularly on the disincentives to construct. I would like to see a lot more focus on that and on the fact there are nearly 200,000 vacant houses in the country that are not holiday homes. I suspect that most of those are private because the voids money has brought back into use much of the local authority housing and housing authorities have got quicker at turnover. We in opposition will work with the Government to deliver on this plan. However, we want the Minister to listen to the measures proposed by us and by other Opposition parties.

At all costs we must avoid the boom and bust cycle that nearly broke our economy and our society, and that was the basis for the huge problems of housing and homelessness that we have now and which have caused such misery and anxiety for so many of our citizens.

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