Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

-----or in the amendments, or in any of the Minister's proposals to deal with the rental sector. Is it affordable? Before the Minister allows for these 4% increases, which he is crowing is some type of unique unprecedented intervention in the market, the current rents in the areas he refers to are unaffordable for the majority of people. He simply has not addressed that.

I raised this on Leaders' Questions today, I have raised it with the Minister on multiple occasions and I will raise it again now. I am not suggesting that south Dublin is unique, I just happen to know south Dublin. Deputy Catherine Murphy has made the argument for Kildare and others will make the argument for other parts of the city and country. The average rent for a three-bedroom house in the south Dublin and Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown areas is €27,360 annually. That is more than the take-home pay of somebody on the minimum wage. How is somebody supposed to afford that rent? How do the Minister's proposals address that? They simply do not. I seek an answer to my question. If the Minister does not give an answer, he will give no answer to the people who are streaming into my clinic each week, and into the clinics of all Members of the House, to tell us they just cannot afford it.

The extent of it is shocking. Over the last three or four years, the people coming to my clinic to tell me they cannot afford it when their landlords put up their rent were initially people on very low incomes. Later it was people on medium incomes. More recently, however, people such as senior nurses and tenured lecturers in third level institutions have been coming to my clinics to say that they are facing homelessness because they cannot afford the rents in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown. When it is reaching that extent, what good is this Bill? That is happening to people on €60,000 per year, because they happen to be single and have three or four children. They cannot afford the rents.

The Minister's rent proposals will allow the rent for a three-bedroom house which is currently €27,360 potentially to increase to €30,636 under the 4% annual cap by the beginning of 2019, in other words, if the 12% increase starts in January of this year. I accept that some will not be able to do this until later in the year or even until the end of the year, but some will be able to do it in the next month. Those people will be able to increase the rent by 12% by the beginning of January 2019. That is two years, not three. It will be 4% in January 2016, 4% in January 2017 and 4% in January 2018, so within two years they will have the 12% increase. Even if it is July or the end of the year when the 4% starts, within the three years the vast majority of people will potentially have their rent increased by 12%. That is the reason I pulled the Minister up earlier. Allowing the increase of 4% to be done every 12 months means it can be done potentially within two years. That is 12% within two years.

I mentioned the rent figure for a three-bedroom house. The current annual rent for a one-bedroom unit in south Dublin and Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown is €21,600 per year. Under the proposed increases that will increase potentially to €24,192 by January 2019. How are people to afford that? The Minister's measures do nothing to address that. The rent is totally unaffordable. However, the Minister is worried about the greed for profit - there are simply no other words to describe it and I am not being rhetorical in saying it - of people who have been systematically evicting people, with spurious excuses in many cases about relatives moving in or the need to sell when, in many if not most circumstances, it is patently not true, to jack up rents to levels that are unaffordable for people on low, middle and even higher than middle incomes. Evicting those people leaves them subject to homelessness services, which are unable to cope. It is breaking up families and leading to depression and people being homeless on the streets in unprecedented numbers.

None of the Minister's measures does anything to address all of this. The Minister is not addressing the fundamental issue, but is allowing for increases which are dictated by the thirst for profit of private landlords and the various financial and property speculators who appear to be dictating Government policy on tax and almost everything else. It is precisely the type of behaviour that led to the last property bubble and its disastrous consequences. To conclude that point, our amendment to the Government's amendment No. 54 essentially proposes that there will be no increases allowed in the rent pressure zones. Rents are at unaffordable levels and there is no justification for any increases to be permitted. We do not accept the argument that the landlords will run for the hills.

In amendment No. 66 we request the Minister to provide a report immediately on the actual rent controls we need. That is the core issue. We have our amendments and other amendments, and Bills have been put forward proposing that rent increases would be linked to the consumer price index, CPI. We agree it is a good minimal measure at least to limit increases to the inflation level, the CPI, as against the proposed 4% cap on rent increases, which is a nonsense, excessive, exorbitant and unaffordable. However, for the reasons I outlined we need to go much further and discuss bringing rents back to affordable levels now that the horse has already bolted and the level of rents in many parts of this city and are beyond affordability. We need seriously to consider pinning them to 2011 levels when they were at something resembling affordability and designating particular areas as fair rent areas. In doing so, in addition to some of the criteria the Minister mentioned which referred to market conditions and market rents, issues such as level of wages, wage increases and the level of homelessness in a particular area should be taken into account as well as all the factors that combine to make rental accommodation affordable rather than, as in the case of the Minister's proposals, linking it to how much profit the developer needs to make and what collectively that adds up to in terms of market conditions.

The need for this is acknowledged in the public housing rental system in local authority housing. That is what the differential rent scheme acknowledges. That is reason we promote, as the solution and alternative to the Minister's complete reliance on the private sector, publicly provided local authority housing where the rent is based on people's ability to pay. That is what is necessary to resolve the housing and rental crisis. The Minister is not willing to provide the scale of public housing that would achieve that, but short of that, the rent control system that is needed is one that would pin rents to a level that is affordable based on people's income.

There are incredible double standards and hypocrisy in the arguments the Minister has made in addressing the concerns of landlords as against addressing the wage demands of workers. That hypocrisy is not lost on workers who have been vilified over the past year or two for having put in wage claims, many of which were motivated precisely by the unaffordabiltiy of accommodation. When Luas, bus or public sector workers have said they want their wage levels to return to 2009 levels, the Government has said that is completely unaffordable, the country cannot afford that, that is unacceptable, that is what led us to boom and bust in the past, and we are not going there. The Government has demonised and stigmatised workers who have made those demands precisely because of rents and property prices going out of control. Workers say they are not taken seriously by the Government, but when landlords say they need 4% rent increases as an absolute minimum, that is okay. Workers cannot ask for a 4% wage increase to keep track with rents but landlords can ask for 4% additional profit on top of the profits they are already making in a rental market that is now in excess of the average rents that were being charged in 2009. There is no problem for landlords to return to 2009 levels and levels prior to that in terms of the rents they are charging and the profits they are making, but if workers ask for their wages to return, even to 2009 levels, that is not acceptable. That is crass and class hypocrisy. There is one law for landlords, speculators and developers and another law for workers. It is as simple and straightforward as that. We ask in our amendment that the question of workers' wages and the relationship between workers' wages and rents should be a factor that is considered and determines the setting the levels of rents. Otherwise we are not going to deal with the problem. It is as simple as that.

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