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

That is why I am concerned that tenants will be given false hope.

We tried to get some data on the criteria that have been set. I am not sure whether the criteria will remain the same. The RTB keeps quarterly rent price data on 446 areas of the country. One can check, using that data, which areas fulfil the year-on-year price increase for four of the last six quarters as well as checking whether the rents in an area are above the national average which, the Minister can correct me if I am wrong, are the two basic requirements. The data that we have been able to assess would suggest that there are a small number of areas - these are only portions of cities and portions of the areas in the counties around Dublin that have been referred to, such as, Meath, Wicklow, Louth and Kildare - and only small portions of those would fulfil those criteria. I hope this is not the case, but I would be worried that we are sending out messages to members of the general public who are hard pressed to pay their rent who believe that there will be some kind of certainty coming out of this process, although not the kind of certainty that we and members of other parties would like. I am concerned that this is being put out there as a panacea to address the real pressures that tenants are under but that when the data - the Minister referred to looking at it at more granular level - is assessed, I am not sure what areas will qualify as pressure areas. That is my main concern. It still makes a lot more sense to simply link proposed rents to the consumer price index, as is done in other countries.

We acknowledge in my amendment No. 63 that where improvements are made - we have a mathematical formula for that - one must recompense landlords who have put a significant amount of money into a property. Apart from that, where there have not been changes, the logical and fair course is to simply link increases to the cost of living.

I will raise one other technical point on amendment No. 1 because I assume that is the first amendment on which we will vote. Amendment No. 1 amends the clause that states when the Act will come into operation. It states: "Sections 32to 36, sections 45, 46and 50come into operation on the day following the passing of this Act", and among those sections is the section that deals with the termination of tenancies for the purpose of sale. It deals with that issue of the number of units - it was originally 20 units, then it came down to five in the Seanad and there is an amendment from Government to bring it back up to ten in the Dáil. We will not reach those amendments until probably later on this evening or tomorrow, but yet we are being asked to vote on bringing them in immediately after the Act comes into operation. We do not have the information because at this point we do not know what will happen - maybe we can guess - in relation to those sections and yet we are being asked, as the first vote here today, to decide that we will bring that measure in after the Seanad deals with the legislation. It is not appropriate that we are being asked to make this decision when we do not know what will be in those sections.

Overall, my real concern is that we are being asked today to bring in legislation that will effectively put an increase of 4% on certain areas and exclude other parts of the country. There is a great deal of uncertainty in relation to the new proposals that are coming before the House today and I genuinely worry that it is unclear what areas are likely to be included. That allows landlords, as previous speakers stated, to immediately go out there and put up the rent where they can. Obviously, if they are tied down to the two years criterion and the review is not coming up, then they cannot do it but there will be many landlords who are in a position to increase the rent in anticipation of it being controlled and that has to be a significant cause of worry for many tenants around this country.

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