Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I wish the Minister and Minister of State well. Both have very important portfolios. We look forward to holding them to account in their jobs.

The most important thing, a first principle, is that one should be safe in the house in which one lives, be it an apartment in a 25-storey block or a single-story building. That is what the objective should be. We saw this very badly violated last week in London. In Millfield Manor in Newbridge, the speed at which the fire travelled through the block of houses shows it is not just at height that there can be a problem. It is absolutely unacceptable that, 15 months after the event, the report is not published. It must be published immediately. The Department has initiated some work on determining the extent of the problem and considering other areas. It will be really important to see that.

I compliment the Green Party on tabling this very timely motion. I was elected to a county council in 1991. Essentially, the nuts and bolts of what we did involved picking up the pieces after the last crash. Some of us are actually quite experienced in picking up the pieces after building downturns or crashes. The motion is quite correct in stating residents themselves are affected, be they occupiers or home owners. The public purse is also affected. If one really wants to take shortcuts, one will do it where they cannot be seen. One will do it in the laying of sewers or by putting water mains too near the surface, or by having soak holes instead of proper drains. I have seen these things routinely. They have to be remediated by the local authority when, invariably, the bad builder goes out of business or is not seen. It really shows up at the point where estates are taken in charge. It is not unfair to say that those who are lucky enough to be able to buy a house, which involves the biggest investment they will have to make in their lives, have more consumer protection for the table and chairs they buy than for the house they buy.

That is not right. We saw that in sharp focus when the likes of HomeBond could not be seen for dust when the pyrite issue erupted.

We need a properly regulated building industry. It is not just about putting good standards in place. They must be enforced. What we need to do is reward good behaviour but also punish bad behaviour. Essentially, there needs to be a mechanism by which to do that. I believe there is a mindset that this is about property that is regulated, given to somebody else to self-certify and one then hopes that everything will be all right. I believe it is down to the Government to promote the standards. The standards must be capable of being rigorously enforced. Otherwise, we will be picking up the pieces into the future. While there are costs up front, those costs are saved in the longer term by getting quality building in place.

Our planning system is really more about planning control. What I mean by that is that we have local area plans and there is a public process. However, they are largely physical plans. They identify things that need to happen and identify standards. It is then down to the individual builder. There is the good, the bad and the indifferent in that group. I have seen absolutely all of those.

An Bord Pleanála permissions would be complicated by the legislation that was passed before Christmas. The local authorities would then be trying to interpret some of the conditions attached to the decisions that are made. Local authorities already have estates of more than 100 houses. They already have difficulty interpreting some of the conditions that An Bord Pleanála attaches. That is something that needs some attention in its own right.

We should not mind taking good ideas from elsewhere. I particularly feel that the building work contractor's licence in Australia is a really good idea. The builder must have a licence to take on any project worth more than $12,000. If the builder loses that licence, he or she cannot build. The really bad people are weeded out by doing something like that. There must be a contract in place. There are statutory warranties in place. It also puts the consumer as king in terms of the person who is going to buy a house as well as in the case of it being built for a local authority or a housing association. It puts the obligation on those who build the houses. That is something that is well worthwhile looking at. It is already in place in Australia and it works very well there.

One of the points made in the motion was about the Construction Industry Federation possibly drafting legislation. If anybody has an idea that that would be a good thing, please get rid of it. We need a tension between the construction sector and the people who regulate it. We have seen where soft regulation does not work elsewhere and it certainly does not work in this sector.

With regard to pyrite, when HomeBond was sought out to be used as redress, it was not available. I am thinking of the late Shane McEntee at this stage. He really made a difference by getting that panel in place. A number of us had ongoing engagements with him because we saw some of the problems with pyrite. Where the remediation scheme has been put in place, there are still people very badly affected in that they cannot sell the property on, though they may be living in inappropriate accommodation that is too small, because they have not got to a degree at which the pyrite is bad enough, but it is still evident. There is more to be done there.

I published a piece of legislation in the last Dáil. One of the things I looked for was a national planning compliance register. The reason I looked for that was because there could be a really bad developer in one part of the country who people found out about and would not buy a house from. Then, the developer would move to another place where he or she was not known. That information would not travel with the developer to the new local authority. Each local authority is working in its own silo. We have to stop that. A compliance register could list people who have enforcement audits out against them or who have been through the courts due to a deficiency. That kind of thing needs to happen. At the moment, it does not work. We saw a celebrated case - to use the word "celebrated inappropriately" - in which there was a very high-profile person who was able to go on and do very serious damage elsewhere. The public purse picked up heavily for it. There was also stress involved for the people who were living in the large complex he subsequently built.

The motion is quite right that it is very timely that we should look at this sector now. We are starting to rebuild. Let us not make the same mistakes that were made in the past. The sector must be properly regulated. Proper regulation does cost money to enforce. When we start to look at the cost of things going wrong for both individuals and collectively for the public purse, we will find that those costs will be well absorbed in the upfront costs that it takes to make sure that we get good standards and that we weed out the people who are taking liberties with the standards that are set. The standards need to be beefed up. However, where they are in place, and in some cases, where there are good standards, they are of no value unless they are properly enforced. With that aspect of it, there must be a survey of the local authorities to investigate their capacity to carry out enforcement, because sometimes the follow-up really lets the system down.

See this speech in context