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

I listened very carefully to the Minister, Deputy Eoghan Murphy, and to the Minister of State, Deputy English. I am genuinely surprised that the Minister said the Government's plan does not overly rely on the private sector. According to the social housing plan in Rebuilding Ireland, 130,000 families were to have their social housing needs met. Of those, 93,000 were to have them met through private sector housing leased for two, four or ten years. That constitutes 72% of the plan. Only 28% or 37,000 were to be housed in what we call real social housing - units owned by local authorities and approved housing bodies. That is clearly an over-reliance on the private sector.

It is exactly the same with affordable housing. There is no direct State involvement in the provision of affordable housing and there is no central Government support for approved housing bodies to provide it. The schemes, whether help-to-buy, the local infrastructure housing activation fund, LIHAF, or the land initiatives, are private sector led. At the very heart of Rebuilding Ireland - and this is as much a fact as those the Minister of State talked about - there is an over-reliance on the private sector to meet the majority of social and affordable housing need. That need is not being met.

I do not disagree with the Minister of State that planning permissions, commencements and ESB connections are increasing and the fast-track planning process is in place. None of that is under dispute. However, none of it guarantees that this plan will meet to a sufficient extent the social and affordable housing need that exists. During the boom, we were building 90,000 houses in one year, yet social and affordable housing need was rising. Supply in and of itself without adequate attention to social and affordable supply does not work automatically.

We argue about figures but it is important to understand them. The report of the Committee on Housing and Homelessness contains very specific recommendations. The committee's first recommendation is that there be an increase in the stock of local authority units and those owned by approved housing bodies by 10,000 a year. Let us consider the Government's figures. In 2016, the increase in the stock under that definition was 2,541. In 2017, it was 3,684 and it will go up to just under 6,000 if the Government's targets for next year are met. That is way short of the minimum identified by the committee as being required. That is a big difference. If the Government meets the targets as set out in Rebuilding Ireland, it will still be 40% short of the minimum that the cross-party housing and homelessness committee recommended. In my view, that is not good enough.

It is not about doing it in a day. Fine Gael has been in government for seven years. It had the Kelly plan in 2014, which was meant to start this process off, and then the Coveney plan. Our frustration is not that the Government is not doing it overnight but that it is not happening even within the six years of the current plan.

If there is a single message we want the Government to take away from this motion, it is that the most important intervention it could make in terms of a change in direction of the plan is to return to large-scale public housing developments with social, affordable rental and affordable sale, delivered with public money on public land to produce vibrant, mixed-income communities. That is not what it is doing at present. The proof of the pudding is that to do what I have just described would require the Government to move towards a capital spend on social and affordable housing in the region of €2 billion annually. Rebuilding Ireland at its very best will give it below €900 million annually through to 2021. Money is an issue. I am not necessarily saying ideology is an issue. However, unless the Government is willing to make that level of investment and direct State intervention, we are going to have very significant difficulties.

Finally, I wish to express a huge frustration. A lot of our debate is rightly about social housing. However, there is no affordable housing coming on stream. We are hearing nothing about LIHAF. There is nothing about the land initiatives, the three sites in Dublin or the Grange in my own constituency. By affordable I mean houses priced at between €170,000 and €260,000. There is no sign that they are going to be delivered. Until the Government starts to show how that is going to happen, not only is it not going to meet social housing need but it will not meet affordable housing need either.

I welcome the fact that the Government is opposing the motion. I urge it to think seriously, particularly in the context of the budget, about the level of capital investment and the speed at which it can deliver those social and affordable units for which the plan currently does not cater.

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