Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I move:

That Dáil Éireann:

notes that:— the social and affordable housing crisis has now reached the level of an emergency;

— growing numbers of people do not have access to affordable, secure and safe homes;

— 8,000 people, including 3,000 children, are being forced to live in emergency accommodation;

— 90,000 households are on council waiting lists, many waiting for more than 10 years for an allocation;

— thousands of people are struggling with high rents, insecurity of tenure and poor standards in the private rental sector;

— thousands more are locked out of the private purchase market by high prices driven up by land speculation;

— the failure to resolve the mortgage distress crisis and keep people in their family home or private rented accommodation continues to push more people into homelessness;

— Rebuilding Ireland does not provide for an adequate level of investment in social or affordable housing;

— Rebuilding Ireland continues to over rely on the private sector to meet social and affordable housing need; and

— Rebuilding Ireland, unless substantially amended, will not address the underlying causes of the housing and homeless crisis; andcalls on the Government to:— honour the proposal from the Report of the Committee on Housing and Homelessness to increase the stock of social houses owned by local authorities and approved housing bodies by a minimum of 10,000 units a year from 2018;

— introduce a new affordable housing programme in 2018 to enable middle-income households to access private rental and private purchase housing at affordable prices;

— support these housing programmes with a capital investment commitment substantially greater than that outlined in Rebuilding Ireland;

— introduce new measures to stop the flow of people into homelessness by providing greater protections for private renters and greater supports for those in long-term mortgage distress; and

— give a clear commitment that no family with children will be left in emergency accommodation for more than six months and that no person will be forced to sleep rough due to lack of safe and appropriate emergency accommodation.

By almost every single indicator, the housing crisis is getting worse. There are 8,000 people who will tonight sleep in emergency accommodation, 3,000 of whom are children. Many of those families with children will spend more than two years in inappropriate emergency accommodation and as the Minister knows, because we have reminded him repeatedly, those figures do not include adults and children in Department of Children and Youth Affairs-funded domestic violence refuge and step-down accommodation nor do they include the families trapped in direct provision, despite the fact that they have got their leave to remain. We have 90,000 households on council waiting lists as of last September and I am sure those figures are already starting to rise yet again. In many local authority areas, the length of time families are waiting for a local authority allocation is in excess of ten years. Thousands of people and households are stuck in an affordability trap with rising rents, rising house prices and, of course, rising land values.

Increasingly, we have problems with insecure tenure in the private rental sector and, far too often, poor standards despite the high prices. We know the private sector is building nowhere close to what its real capacity is or indeed its planning permissions and its funding. In other key areas, Traveller accommodation budgets are still appallingly underspent by local authorities and people with disabilities, both in the social and private housing sector, by and large continue to be ignored. Every single piece of our housing system is broken in a way that is worse than before.

I have no doubt that when the Minister gets to his feet he will tell Members that he inherited a housing crisis from the last Fianna Fáil Government. He will tell us they did not have the funds to invest in social housing from 2011 to 2014 but since the Kelly plan and then the Coveney plan, things are allegedly getting back on track. The Minister will tell us that the numbers of planning permissions and commencements are up. He may even repeat the mistruth that money is not an object in tackling the housing crisis but in all the indicators I have outlined, the Department's own figures tell a very different story. More importantly, the lived experience of thousands of families contradicts the Minister.

The truth is the Government's housing plan simply is not working and unfortunately, in certain areas it is actually making things worse. When the Minister, Deputy Eoghan Murphy, took office I told him that if and when he introduced measures that Sinn Féin believed would start to tackle the causes of the crisis I would support him but if he continued to pursue failed policies or indeed introduce even worse ones, we would hold him to account.

While in my view it is too early to judge the Minister, Deputy Eoghan Murphy, there are some very worrying signs. His predecessor, the Minister, Deputy Coveney, promised much but delivered very little. If he had put as much effort into social housing and affordable housing supply as he did to organising fancy launches and publishing glossy documents, he might have had more success.

However, there are some signs that the Minister is following in his predecessor's footsteps. I have a document to hand, which I am happy to give to him after the debate. In the past two and a half months, he has made either directly or indirectly through leaks from his Department 49 separate policy announcements. I do not know if the Minister has approved all of those but they are 49 different measures and proposed changes to Rebuilding Ireland. We were told there would be a review. We were told there would be a publication of a review document but it seems that what the Minister is doing is launching and half leaking new ideas and proposals to give the impression that he is doing something when I am yet to be convinced that anything is being done at all. Eighteen of these actions were announced after the homeless summit on 8 September. Some of them are not bad ideas. Some were measures that were already announced and some, particularly those that increased the administrative burden on the Residential Tenancies Board and local authorities, will simply make matters worse.

There are 31 different leaks of different policy propositions and either the Minister is consenting to them being leaked by his Department or he is not in control of other members of his party or the Department who are leaking these without his consent. What is crucial, however, is when we look at the picture of those 49 measures, there is no coherence to any of that whatsoever. It smacks of a Minister desperate to give the impression of action when, unfortunately, he is continuing on the same path as his predecessor.

The central problem with the plan the Minister inherited from the latter is that it targeted - or planned to target - the social housing needs of 130,000 families over six years but, as the he is aware, only 37,000 of these will be housed through real social housing. Some 93,000 families, according to the Minister's plan, will allegedly have their housing needs met in the private rental sector, 83,000 through two-year HAP tenancies and 10,000 through longer-term leases. This means that 72% of the Minister's plan for social housing in the State relies on subsidised private rental accommodation.

Capital investment in real social housing remains - this will continue to be the case under the plan - unacceptably low: €733 million this year and €788 million next year. Throughout the lifetime of the plan, if the Minister meets his targets, it will not go above the level at which it was before Fine Gael took office in 2011. With low investment comes low output: 2,541 real, new additional social units for the system in 2016, not including the voids; 3,684 this year, not including the voids; and next year we are promised somewhere in the region of more than 5,000. This is less than half of the 10,000 real social housing units that the cross-party Committee on Housing and Homelessness, which was supported by members of the Minister's own party, strongly recommended. To make matters worse, the Department continues to impose an 18-to-24-month approval process in local authorities, slowing down the delivery of these much-needed homes. In fact, even for the alleged rapid-builds, the approval process is 12 months before a contractor goes on site. Meanwhile, there is no direct central government investment in the provision of affordable rental or affordable purchase housing, and the current schemes, whether the help-to-buy model or the local infrastructure housing activation fund, are either not having any positive impact on affordability or are making matters worse. The cost-rental model is nowhere to be seen. Meanwhile, good projects such as Ó Cualann project in Poppintree, which the Minister visited to have his photograph taken, are not getting any significant backing from central government funds, despite the fact that good-quality family homes at prices of between €170,000 and €225,000 are on offer there. Why does this Government believe that social and affordable housing need can be met by giving public money to private landlords and private developers? At what point will it accept that the best way to meet this need is for direct State investment in public housing on public land?

The motion before us is straightforward. We could have proposed many other things in it but really what we wanted to do was to focus on four key propositions. The first is, yet again, to urge the Minister to put the money on the table in the capital programme in order to deliver the minimum of 10,000 real social housing units each year, starting next year. The second is for direct State investment in affordable rental and affordable purchase housing, either delivered directly through local authorities or between local authorities and approved housing bodies on the model of the Ó Cualann project. The third is to take more direct action - something that is sorely lacking in the 18 points the Minister launched after the much-hyped homelessness summit - to stop the flow of families into homelessness. The Focus Ireland amendment is one key way of doing this, but we also urge the Minister to take more direct action to assist those in mortgage distress, including buy-to-let landlords who have rent-paying tenants in their properties, and to prevent those families from becoming homeless. Finally, we seek a clear commitment that no individual, family or child will spend more than six months in emergency accommodation and that no one will be forced to sleep rough because of the absence of secure and safe emergency accommodation. The latter have both been Government policy since 2008 but they have yet to be realised.

To comment briefly on the amendments, there is much I agree with in the Labour, People Before Profit and Fianna Fáil amendments, but Sinn Féin has taken the decision that we will not accept them. This is not because we have huge disagreements with them, but, rather, because we want to keep the focus of this Private Members' business on the four key issues to which I refer. We have some differences over the mechanics of how best to mobilise the assets and resources of NAMA. There are some parts of the People Before Profit amendment that we think are just unrealistic in the short term and some aspects of the Fianna Fáil measure with which we do not necessarily agree, although we accept the spirit of many of the amendments.

The crucial thing is this: if the Minister comes back to us over the next couple of weeks with more leaks and announcements and then with a minor increase in capital expenditure on budget day, what he is essentially saying is that the core programme that was introduced by his predecessor, Deputy Coveney, remains in place. The truth of the Government's own figures is that the private sector cannot and will not meet the housing needs of people reliant on social, affordable rental housing or affordable purchase housing. On that basis I urge the Minister to listen to what many of us in this House have been saying, listen to what the Dáil Committee on Housing and Homeless is saying and change track. If he does, he will be recognised for decades as the Minister who finally started to get a grip on the housing and homelessness crisis. If he does not, he will go down on that long list of ministerial failures - including Deputies Coveney and Kelly and former Deputies Gormley and Finneran - before him. They had the opportunity and failed because they would not invest in public housing on public land for those people who need social and affordable housing.

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