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

I will be glad when he is. I have become increasingly frustrated in recent months because the critical issues facing huge numbers of citizens will be drowned out. They are already being drowned out in the hubbub of the personality contest that is occurring within Fine Gael. Certainly, my frustration has escalated in the past few days. The media is awash and I fear will be for weeks with the beauty contest between the two candidates for Fine Gael leadership, thereby drowning out critical issues of importance to our citizens. While the identity of the next Taoiseach is not an unimportant issue, it certainly should not be allowed to drown out critical issues facing ordinary people. No issue is more critical than the housing, homelessness, eviction and rental crisis now facing tens of thousands of our citizens and inflicting really appalling hardship on them. I argue very strongly that the evidence is now piling up daily to show the Government's approach to dealing with this crisis is failing disastrously. In particular, the Rebuilding Ireland plan and the residential tendencies legislation brought in by the Minister, Deputy Simon Coveney, in December have absolutely failed and will fail further to address a crisis or emergency that is absolutely spiralling out of control.

In the past couple of weeks, I have used the time available to me during Leaders' Questions to try to highlight just how bad the circumstances are in a number of areas and how existing policies and legislation have failed to deal with the real crisis faced by families, individuals and, tragically, children right across the city and urban areas throughout the country. That failure comes in a number of forms. We do not believe this Bill alone is the panacea to all the problems that need to be addressed if we are to deal with this emergency but it is part of a suite of measures that need to be implemented urgently on an emergency basis to stem this crisis.

What is in the wider suite of measures? We have said multiple times – I will not spend a great deal of time going through this – that the ultimate solution to the current crisis is the provision of a massive amount of council housing, directly provided by the State and local authorities. I do not refer to the outsourcing of social housing to the private sector. What I propose is the critical step. We also need to stop immediately selling off, via NAMA, residential property, land banks and so on to vulture funds that are gaining oligopolistic control, or a virtual monopoly, over residential property and land, thereby ratcheting up rents, evicting people and escalating the housing crisis. One critical aspect of what needs to be done is contained in this Bill, the purpose of which is to deal with spiralling rents and the eviction crisis. Prior to December, the Bill of the Minister claimed to be an effort to address this. I put it to him that recent weeks have shown clearly that it failed to do so because it is riddled with loopholes. Those loopholes were particularly demonstrated in the Robin Hill case. Mistake number one in wider policy terms is NAMA selling off huge portfolios of residential properties to the vulture funds to give them the opportunity to ratchet up rents and evict people. In terms of what they can do to tenants, the flaws in the Minister's legislation become clear. The rent pressure zones, which are not dissimilar from the four rent zones we propose in this Bill, which are supposed to limit rent increases to 4% per year, have a number of key get-out clauses for vulture funds, as we have seen with Robin Hill. Tragically, I believe we will see a lot more of this. Think about the size of Project Gem, with its assets worth €3 billion. We are going to see more of this.

What are the loopholes? The first is that if the landlords claim they are refurbishing the apartments substantially, they can go beyond 4%. The second is that they can introduce backdoor charges. In the case of Robin Hill, heating and hot water charges may be introduced effectively to increase the rent dramatically at a rate way beyond 4%. The third is that the legislation of the Minister allows the landlords to go beyond 4% if they can make a case that the rent they are charging, to which they are restricted in the rent pressure zones, is leading to a significant loss vis-à-vis what they would make if they got the full market value.

6 o’clock

These are major get-out clauses, all of which are being exploited by the new owner, Cerberus, the vulture fund, in Robin Hill. The other big loophole is the Tyrrelstown amendment about which we warned the Minister. Allowing for up to nine people to be evicted in multi-unit complexes means that is what landlords will do. They evict up to nine people in phases over time. All of this is happening in Robin Hill, highlighting the major flaws in the Minister's legislation.

The Bill also seeks to address another flawed central element of his housing policy in respect of the housing assistance payment, HAP. HAP was described by him as a secure form of social housing and we have discovered over the past few weeks tenants who had been homeless, sometimes for a year or two years, and who then secured HAP accommodation thinking they had secure social housing being told by their landlords, "Sorry, I am selling up and I am evicting you". They are faced with homelessness again. Amanda, a young woman, attended our press conference about the Bill earlier. She wrote to me, stating:

I was homeless last year. I was told HAP was my only option to get myself out of homelessness. Now a year later I am now facing homelessness again. I can't find a property to rent within the HAP limits for my family size. The stress of the situation has really taken its toll on my health. I am suffering with postnatal depression and now I am feeling a lot worse than I was before. I cannot even sleep anymore. It's just a constant worry not only for me but for my three kids. I lost everything when I was homeless before but I built my life back up and got things together for the kids. Now we are back to square one. It's devastating. All I want is a secure home.

When she was told to find another HAP tenancy, which cannot be found, she pointed out to the council that she did not have the money for a deposit even if she found one. The officials said she had a deposit with her existing landlord and they would not give her another one. It is impossible. This is against a background where the Simon Community reported earlier this week that average rent in Dublin for a two-bedroom property is €2,629 a month compared with a HAP limit of €1,275. This is incredible. The HAP support is, therefore, less than half the average rent in Dublin for a property of this size. The scheme cannot work and it is not working with people like Amanda suffering the consequences.

Against that background, our Bill does something simple. It first recognises that there is an emergency and establishes an emergency regime to deal with areas in which homelessness and the rental crisis are out of control, giving the Minister power to designate them as "fair rent areas". He can do this because the authors of this Bill worked with Deputies Bríd Smith, Gino Kenny and with me. They dealt extensively with the Parliament's legal advisers and it has been crafted to essentially employ the same logic as the financial emergency measures in the public interest, FEMPI, legislation, which was used to cut public service pay and pensions. The Government can introduce emergency legislation and get around so-called constitutional barriers on the basis of declaring of an emergency in the housing sector. The legislation gives the Minister the power to declare an emergency in particular areas and to take emergency measures that follow from that. Among the measures, he can pin rents back to 2011 levels. Since 2011, rents have increased by 60% to the unaffordable levels I have outlined. If the Minister did what the Bill proposes and used 2011 as the baseline for rents while taking account of increases in the consumer price index, CPI, and wages, average rents in Dublin would fall to around the HAP limits. In other words, HAP might be viable. I do not agree with it as a solution but it might at some level be viable if the Minister did this, otherwise, it is a complete fantasy, which will lead to an ever worsening crisis. The emergency measures allow for consultation and submissions to be made to the PRTB, which will set fair rents, but the baseline is 2011 rents before the 60% increase in subsequent years. This also takes into account CPI and wage increases. The CPI has increased by 1.6% since 2011 while wages have increased by 2.6%. Rent increases have outstripped increases in the CPI and wages by a multiple of 15, which is unsustainable. The legislation seeks to address this on the same basis that the FEMPI legislation unjustly cut the pay and pensions of public sector workers.

The other key issue the legislation addresses in fair rent areas is security of tenure. This would prevent what is happening in Robin Hill and what is happening to people like Amanda who is being evicted by a HAP landlord because in those areas it would remove almost all the existing grounds for eviction, including sale, except for emergency circumstances for the family of the owner of the property. The owners could make a case to the PRTB that they need the place for themselves. However, this would prevent vulture funds from evicting people with spurious justifications to secure vacant possession to ratchet up rents and drive people into homelessness. This is a fair and reasonable provision. It would provide for it on an ongoing basis but at least the power should be introduced to do it in areas where there is an emergency. Whatever the Minister may say about the wider philosophical issue of rent controls, this should be done in the here and now to prevent the profiteering on rents that is leading directly to evictions, homelessness and a social catastrophe, which is inflicting incredible hardship on people. This can be done through this robust legislation. We do not say it is the complete solution by any means. We need a major social housing programme and a right to housing established in the Constitution with rebalanced property rights for the common good. These measures could prevent the economic evictions that are taking place, and the rent racketeering that is driving people into homelessness. I appeal to the Government, the Minister and the House to support the legislation.

See this speech in context