Joan Collins (Dublin South Central, Independent) | Oireachtas source

When I read this Bill, I was amazed. I find it incredible that it advocates a broadening of the tenant purchase scheme to sell-off social housing at knock down prices at a time when we are faced with a massive housing and homeless emergency. I understand there is demand from tenants to buy their homes but surely the priority now is not just retention of our inadequate 120,000 social housing stock but the construction of more social housing and the maintenance of an adequate level of social housing stock into the future.

The key reason for the current crisis is the disastrous decisions of successive Governments and local authorities to divest themselves from social housing provision and to abandon their responsibilities to provide good quality, well-maintained, low-cost housing to those who need it. There needs to be a reversal of the group think and ideological bias against local authority housing that lies at the heart of the current crisis, namely, local authority housing bad and private housing good.

The housing and homeless strategy launched yesterday by the Government includes a proposal to build 47,000 social housing units over the next five years. In my opinion, this is about 50% of what is actually required. Let us for a moment assume that the 47,000 social houses are built and allocated. Are we then going to repeat the mistakes of the past by initiating a scheme to sell them off at knock down prices only to be faced in ten years with the same situation with which we are faced today? I am not a supporter of tenant purchase schemes unless they are well constructed and provide that when a tenant buys a house the money derived from the sale is used to buy back or build a new council house. They should also include strong clawback clauses in situations where houses are resold within five or, perhaps, ten years.

The issue of an elderly person living in a three bedroom house was mentioned. Why are we not building small clusters of ten or 15 units in our communities for elderly and disabled people? This would allow elderly and disabled people to sell their houses to the council and move into a secure environment, if they want to, thereby providing more housing stock for the council. We must resist the demands for Part V social housing. It is not the priority. I am amazed that any serious political party could come forward with such a proposal given the crisis we are faced with.

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