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

Given that it is the second last day of term before the summer recess, People Before Profit and Solidarity will not stand in the way of legislation that might do anything to facilitate the continued provision of desperately needed housing to increase the famous supply we all know to be necessary to deal with the catastrophic - I do not think that is an exaggeration - housing and homelessness crisis in which we find ourselves. I do not think anyone of good conscience could do anything that might hamper the delivery of housing that would have any impact for families who desperately need a roofs over their heads, particularly if, as I understand it, two of those developments are social housing developments, as Deputy Ó Broin has said.

Having said that, there are concerns that this legislation might facilitate land hoarding and we need the Minister's absolute assurance that it will not. He should seriously take on board the amendments that have been tabled that are designed to ensure this does not happen because land hoarding is a central part of the crisis we now face and of the crisis that preceded it in 2008. We therefore need his assurances in this regard and need him to answer the questions that are put and provide justifications for refusing these amendments if that is his intention. I understand he is considering one of the amendments. Frankly, as I do not see any problem with any of them, we need an explanation as to why he will not accept amendments that are designed to safeguard against land hoarding. As an aside, I do not know how these developers who engage in land hoarding can sleep at night, given the situation we now face. It is obscene that people are deliberately manipulating and exploiting what is an enormous social crisis just so they can increase the value of their investments, property and developments while people sleep in cars and couch surf, families are split up and people rot on housing lists for a decade or more. That people perceive this dire situation as an opportunity to increase the value of their investments is shocking, but that is the immoral world of the market and of capitalism: conscience is thrown aside in the filthy pursuit of profit at all costs. Some assurance that allowing for these extensions of planning permission will not facilitate that is absolutely critical. That being said, we could not and will not do anything to block any delivery of housing that is urgently needed.

However, given we are debating Second Stage of the Bill, I must say that this week we have been subject to what I think it is fair to describe as an absolute avalanche of legislation, with stuff being thrown at us left, right and centre. Some of it may be useful, as in the case of the Bill before us; one's head would be dizzy trying to figure out the content of other stuff coming before the House. We have just had a motion passed, without any serious public debate, on another issue that could have very serious implications on another area of concern to the public.

I do not like this method of doing things, with an avalanche at the last minute to do some things that might be worthy and some things that might be very dubious and which people in this country might live to regret. I want to flag that fact.

If we are going to engage in a type of emergency legislation at the last minute, I would like to see legislation which deals with the most urgent issues rather than some of the legislation that went through this week. This Bill is attempting to do that at some level. There is no more urgent issue than the issue of housing and homelessness. I cannot see why we should not include an amendment to Part V. The decision of the Government to reduce social and affordable housing from 20% to 10% as a condition of any development could have gone into this Bill as well. I said last week that this is critical. We can look at what the Minister has just cited in terms of what is happening over the summer. Of the 75 developments he says could be blocked if this legislation does not get through, only two of them are social housing. That tells its own story. To my mind that means that 73 of those developments, or at least a very high proportion of the 73 other developments that are not specifically social housing, will be unaffordable to the people who need housing.

Surely one of the lessons of the previous crisis is that even if supply is massively increased, as happened in the years leading up to 2008 when there were 70,000 to 90,000 residential units per year being built, it does not in any way guarantee that the housing and homelessness crisis will be stemmed or the housing lists reduced or that ordinary people in this country who need a secure, affordable and permanent roof over their head will benefit. I wonder if there is any acknowledgement of that fact. Is there any recognition on the part of the Minister that the major expansion in the construction and delivery of housing that he hopes will happen does not in any sense guarantee that we will solve the housing crisis? We have the very recent experience of a massive increase and expansion in the supply of housing and that did not solve the crisis. It led to a massive economic crash, ghost estates and people taking on debts they simply could not afford, but it did nothing to deal with the housing crisis. The Deputies in this House who have been around for a few years know that the housing list continued to lengthen during the period 2005 to 2008. It did not get shorter when we had a record delivery and output of housing. The list got longer. It accelerated and got worse after 2008, to the disastrous level we are at now. It is simply not the case that if supply is increased, demand is met. These graphs, the equivalent of which can be found in leaving certificate textbooks, do not work in reality. That is not an ideological assertion but a simple statement of fact about what happened in the years between 2004 and 2008. The massive increase in supply did not meet demand.

There is no reason to believe it is going to meet demand this time. In fact, there is every reason to believe it will not when one looks at what is happening with house prices and with rents. Stuff will be delivered and it will be unaffordable. If it proceeds as it did before, particularly now when the real value of wages for huge numbers of people has fallen, I foresee another credit bubble. How else can it happen? I just cannot see another outcome. The real value of wages is now less than it was in 2006, 2007 and 2008. How are people going to afford this stuff? Either they will not be able to afford it or they will have to borrow money they cannot afford, risking a repeat of what happened previously. I would like to hear some response to that. I believe there is no response to it. The only way the expanded output the Minister is hoping for will deal with the catastrophic situation we are now facing is if price is controlled. That can only be done if the State provides the housing.

I hear some people say that we need an affordable scheme. We do, absolutely, but we must remember that the previous affordable scheme was a disaster. It did not work and did not deliver affordable housing. I would like to know how someone is going to do it now if it is not the local authorities deciding what is affordable. If it is in any way linked to the market and some sort of notional discount from the market, it is going to be unaffordable in all the places where the demand is most acute. I simply cannot see how it can be any other way. When I hear terms like affordable rental, a chill goes down my spine. What is affordable rental? It is something called the differential rent scheme. That is what council rents are. What is this other category of affordable rental that we think we are going to come up with? Council rents are affordable rental and are linked to ability to pay based on income. If the income goes up, the rent goes up. If it goes down, the rent goes down. The level of rent is set as a proportion of how much it is reasonable to expect someone to pay in rent given their income. That is affordable rental. Why would there be another category of affordable rental? It will be rent that is set by the developers and the market. We can debate if there should be a 5% or 10% discount on that, but it would be way in excess of what ordinary people can afford.

Even if the Minister will not do what we are asking, and I hope that he will, he has to realise that we have to double, if not treble, the planned output of council housing, delivered by the councils and ideally with a State construction company marshalling the workforce with the skills to deliver it on our terms. The plans should be dictated by this House rather than the vagaries of the market or what the vulture funds feel like doing. I hope we will do that. At the very minimum we should have a higher proportion of what is being given to the developers in the case of these 700 sites or in the case of the big developments that are beginning to take place. I have mentioned Cherrywood. There are 8,000 units in that development. If we got even 30% of Cherrywood, we could pretty much solve the housing crisis in Dún Laoghaire, but 10% of it is not going to go anywhere near to dealing with it and the prices would be worse at the end of it. Will the Minister not do that? When this was being debated before, there was talk of legal advice from the Attorney General. It was suggested that 10% is okay but if we go above 10% we are in danger of infringing private property rights. I would love to hear the argument around that and how 10% is not infringing property rights but 20% or 30% is. That does not make any sense to me.

The argument used against rent controls was that it could not be done, and then suddenly it became possible. If any kind of rent control is possible, it should be a more substantial rent control that brings rents to affordable levels. At a very minimum in this specific legislation, the 10% threshold could have been increased or an injunction placed on local authorities in order that they would have had to have gone for more than 10% of the private developments that are being built.

6 o’clock

The Government could have changed NAMA's mandate, although that horse has more or less bolted. In so far as the agency has any assets left, the Government could have said "NAMA is not going to sell any more property to vulture funds because we know what a disaster that has been". Does the Government even acknowledge that what happened with NAMA was a big mistake? It could cover itself by saying that when NAMA was first set up it seemed reasonable to mandate it but that, in the face of a massive housing crisis, the idea that the State should unload large amounts of properties to vulture funds that sit on them, evict people and ratchet up rents, was not the greatest and that maybe the practice could be stopped.

We could have legislation that declares a housing emergency for the next three or four months and that all economic evictions will stop. The Government could say it will ensure that the position will not get worse. That could have been done in this Bill. It could have closed the loopholes that have been exposed in the Planning and Development (Housing) and Residential Tenancies Act 2016. We have discovered that it is possible to get around the 4% cap on annual rent increases in a series of ways, which is what vulture funds are doing at the expense of tenants. The Government could have adopted emergency measures such as the compulsory purchase of empty lands and properties. That matter needs to be dealt with as a matter of urgency.

I would like to hear what the Minister has to say about fire regulations in view of the horror of Grenfell Tower and the possibility that we could have similar situations here. I spoke to the Minister of State at the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Deputy Doyle, about this recently. Is the Minister engaging with the concerns flagged by people such as Noel Manning, a fire safety consultant, about the inadequacy of the fire regulations? I am not an expert but Mr. Manning has stated that the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government has known for years, and has received submissions to the effect, that the existing fire regulations will not deliver on the requirement to ensure that between units there is fire resistance to the degree of 60 minutes. We saw evidence of this in the Newbridge fire. The fire spread in houses that were signed off as compliant with fire regulations showing that those regulations failed. When will we get a clear response in respect of those very worrying allegations? When will the fire regulations be amended in order to ensure we do not see a repeat of the Grenfell Towers fire? This should happen as a matter of urgency.

I would have liked to see urgent legislation - this could have been done in a number of ways but it definitely could have been included in this Bill - to protect school playing fields that are being sold off by the religious congregations in order to pay off debts relating to the abuse that took place over many years. I have mentioned Clonkeen College in my area, the playing fields relating to which have been sold off, on several occasions. Approximately 80% of school playing fields that have been used for years by schools and that are owned by these religious congregations are zoned residential so, effectively, there is no planning protection against the Christian Brothers seeing these as a financial asset and flogging them off and degrading the facilities available to our schools. Those are some emergency measures I would like to have seen in addition to what is being done to deal with the urgent social crisis around housing. I would have liked issues such as fire safety and school playing fields to have been addressed also.

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