Ruth Coppinger (Dublin West, Anti-Austerity Alliance) | Oireachtas source

We have heard much about the need for this Bill to be progressed very quickly. Those of us who on the housing committee heard the Minister's arguments to speed up its passage or allow it to bypass pre-legislative scrutiny. People may have the impression that this is emergency legislation to resolve the housing crisis. I only wish it were so. The Bill has fallen way off the target of what is causing the housing crisis. It will neither resolve it nor make an affordable house available any more quickly to anybody and it damages and sets aside important checks on developers in cases of large developments. Tenants' rights are very poor in Ireland compared with other countries, despite the fact that at least 20% of people now rent. The figure is much higher for cities. The Bill does not give any additional powers to tenants over a landlord to protect themselves against eviction. I will deal with that further in a moment.

Regarding planning issues, the Irish Planning Institute is quite alarmed by this Bill. It would argue that the very important local checks by communities and councillors will be damaged by the Bill, with no evidence that this is necessary. Nobody examining the situation could say that the planning system is to blame for the delay in housing coming on stream. In Dublin alone, there are 28,000 planning applications granted and thousands more in the pipeline. Why are these applications not being processed? We must nail this. It is because developers are hoarding the land and waiting for prices to increase in order that they can make even more of a killing on the market. This is absolutely the reason for the delay. The developers have their planning permissions and they are not using them. Instead of caving in to developers, we must intervene.

The other argument I think the Minister used concerned a very small sample of planning applications. I have seen many counter-examples as a councillor. It is not the case that huge delays come at local level. In fact, very few planning applications are delayed. Those that are tend to be very unusual, with large-scale objections and so on. If a big development is being considered for planning permission, it is important that communities have a right to a say on such matters as overshadowing, traffic and so on. It is quite a serious erosion of rights for the Minister to wipe that away. I have seen a sample in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council in which no planning applications whatsoever were delayed at local level. We really need to hear much more evidence from the Minister and the proponents of the Bill that this is necessary.

What is delaying housing now? NAMA, a huge landholder in key areas where there is a housing crisis, has been sitting on land for a number of years and the developers are dysfunctional after the crash. However, it now seems that we must wait for the private developers to decide when it is profitable for them to start building again rather than for the State to intervene and build affordable housing on a grand scale, as it did in the 1970s to resolve the housing crisis of the 1960s. In the 1970s, 8,000 or 9,000 local authority homes were routinely built every single year without fail. That is the only way. The focus yet again is on kick-starting the private developers and removing impediments in their way, whereas we all know that there is no guarantee they will provide affordable housing.

I also want to deal with the issue of tenants' rights. My constituency, Dublin West, has been widely acknowledged as having a very serious homelessness crisis. Several surveys have shown that 40% of those in homeless and emergency accommodation in Dublin hail from Dublin West. There are particular reasons for this. Dublin West has a young population and a large migrant population which are very reliant on private rented accommodation. It also forms part of a local authority that simply does not have the land zoned to build housing straight away. There is a key reason people are being made homeless now, however, and I mentioned it last night in the other debate we had. We went through a survey of our cases. The reason given in 31% of cases of eviction was sale of the property. In 12% of cases, there was a family member the landlord suddenly needed to move into the property. These two grounds alone constitute 43% of cases. Sale of the property has bypassed rent increases as a reason for eviction. Many people can apply for a rent increase, although rent increases are increasingly being used to vacate properties in many areas. The Minister originally proposed, supposedly to declaw the vulture funds, that they could only evict 20 families, and they are usually families, from properties in one development in a period of six months. I pointed out to the Minister in September when he broached this matter with the Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government that such a measure would be very simply bypassed by just ordering 19 evictions. Getting rid of people in large-scale developments is a long-haul game anyway. It takes some time for these landlords.

The other point I made is that we must outlaw the sale of the property in such cases for anybody at all. Most tenants in this country - 83.5% - live in properties owned by a landlord who owns fewer than ten properties, so the Minister's original proposal would only have catered for a tiny number of people. However, 70% live in properties owned by a landlord who only owns four properties or fewer. An amendment was passed in the Seanad, which I assume was against the Minister's wishes, to change the number of evictions permissible to five per development. Even with the amendment, 70% of people will not be covered by this measure. The Minister has left in many loopholes to protect landlords in these locations.

Let us say they can only carry out five evictions at a time. One way a landlord can get around the measure is to state that he or she would lose, as the Minister has put it, 20% in the sale of a property if he or she must sell with a tenant in situas opposed to on the open market as a vacant dwelling. That is very easy to do. Once again, the Minister is placing the rights of landlords and vulture funds to profiteer over the right of a family to keep a roof over its head. We all know that all a landlord has to do is show three other properties in the area with a higher sale price and - bingo - they can evict. They are doing this now. It is simply not good enough to leave in the legislation such a huge power in the landlords' hands. If the Minister is serious about hitting the vulture funds, this just looks as if he wants to be seen to be hitting them when he is not. I understand that amendments have been made to the other ground, that is, that if it is unduly onerous on the landlord, he or she can be exempted. The Minister is giving landlords so many loopholes to get out of this. They have all the legal teams they need against the usually powerless family that does not even know the law or its rights. I ask the Minister to accept amendments on this matter on the next Stage of this process.

Another issue I seriously implore the Minister to consider is Part 4 tenancies. These also came up in the debate last night. He can put into the legislation all the changes he likes, but if a vulture fund or landlord wants to get rid of somebody, it simply has to wait until the four-year cycle is up before the tenant is back to a period of having no rights again.

It is normal and usual for families to be in properties for at least four or five years before eviction comes on the cards. The Minister must rebalance the rights of tenants over the rights of landlords to evict at will.

In my remaining time I would like to clarify remarks I made last night in the housing debate, and I spoke with the Ceann Comhairle about this earlier. I made the point that there is a very high level of landlord representation in this House when compared with society as a whole. In society, 4% of Irish people are landlords but in here the level is 20% to 25%. When I spoke about the Minister and Minister of State, it certainly was not personal. It was a political point that being close to landlord activity must influence decisions made here or decisions made by parties. It was a political point about how decisions are made. I understand the Minister of State is not a landlord; he owns multiple properties but he is not a landlord.

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