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

I thank the Green Party for tabling tonight's motion. Whether renting or buying, the key issue facing anyone looking for secure housing today is affordability. This is the critical issue. Quite simply put, housing is not an affordable option for many, including those who are on relatively decent wages. For example, I have sent working people who are at risk of losing their homes to the Focus Ireland café. We would never have considered this possible. Everywhere we look, we will find people paying ever higher proportions of their income on rent or mortgage payments while being absolutely terrified of losing their home. Often it is more expensive to rent than to buy but in many cases people cannot get a mortgage. The figure of 35% of one's gross income is used as a benchmark when considering the maximum a person should be spending on his or her accommodation needs but people are going way beyond it and are denying themselves food and heat to compensate. It is a case of Hobson's choice.

To buy an ordinary home in Cork or Galway, one needs to be earning five times the average wage. It is eight times the average wage for homes in Dublin. Therefore, renting becomes the default option for so many people who simply cannot afford to buy. People are then paying huge rents and will never be in the position to be able to save in order to be in a position to get a mortgage to purchase a home, so the cycle continues. Those people are left to the mercy of the private rental sector, which is poorly regulated and subject to the whim of the markets.

Average rents have spiralled by almost 50% over the past four years. A test of any fair society is its capacity to house its people. This issue has been on the agenda every single solitary week since last September, yet we are back here again talking about housing in one guise or another. Despite all the fancy words and the so-called action plans, the only action is further entrenchment into the mindset of abdicating responsibility primarily to the private sector. It is clear that there is no security for those who rent and that buying a home is increasingly becoming a pipedream for many. This is simply not acceptable.

We must get out of the mindset of thinking of bricks and mortar as property. We must think of it as someone's home. If the mindset was different, the response would be different. While we in the Social Democrats support the cost-rental model proposed in tonight's motion, it is incumbent on us to note that, whatever model or solutions are employed, one of the key considerations must be to ensure a mix of tenure types so as not to end up with a concentration of one particular tenure type, or size of housing unit, in order to have communities that are sustainable. It is the only sure fire way to ensure healthy and sustainable communities and to ensure they are not transient. This should be the key objective of any housing policy.

The Government must take immediate action to ensure long-term rent certainty. We in the Social Democrats have called for an immediate linking of rents to the consumer price index until there is sufficient housing to drive rents down. Even that is too late because prices are too high as it stands, however. We must free up as many of the 200,000 vacant properties throughout the country using mechanisms such as the vacant site levy. We must enforce that levy and make it punitive enough to count, but the budgetary measures do not achieve that as the levy is less than the rate of land inflation. Therefore, it is not having the desired effect. We need to drive down the cost of housing and bring ordinary homes within reach of ordinary incomes. Otherwise, we will have a mismatch where people will be demanding ever-increasing incomes because they need higher incomes to meet their basic housing needs.

We need a strong building sector but we have to reduce building costs, including finance costs. There may well be arguments relating to particular sites about which others have spoken. The Broadstone site would be a particularly great one given it is so close to the city and the Grangegorman campus. It is occupied by Dublin Bus and Bus Éireann at the moment, however. Doing things to scale would introduce more certainty. The building could be done to scale. The builders could come in and do pieces of the work. Alternatively, it can be done in a way that creates certainty. For instance, perhaps they would not have to go through planning permission individually.

Across Europe and in many large American cities, long-term rentals are a vibrant and important part of the overall housing strategy. People happily rent knowing they have security of tenure, rent certainty and a place they can legitimately call home. They can put down roots and build sustainable communities, which is critical. The only reason we have failed to achieve such a rental sector in Ireland is because the Government has consistently taken a hands-off approach and allowed market considerations and landlord interests to dominate. A vibrant, affordable sector could benefit both landlords and tenants and should be encouraged, not avoided as it has been for so long. The cost-rental model provides a social mix and removes the profit motive from the supply of housing. It is a valuable model and it needs to be embraced in the context of mixed developments.

In the national planning framework, €11 billion was identified over ten years to build 112,000 houses. There are just over 100,000 people on the housing waiting list. If one assumes one does not have to make HAP payments, or provide long-term leasing and can apply all of that money to build 112,000 houses, they will still have to come in at €100,000 each. The Taoiseach was asked if it was build or provide because the terminology was obscure. It was "provide" and he said it was "build". I would like to see where one can build houses for €100,000 each because that is the calculation. It does not divide up any other way.

The cost-rental model requires several different approaches. This is a valuable piece in addition, not instead of, local authority and private sector construction. The principal achievement must be to get to a point where people can afford a roof over their head, there is a degree of certainty, whether they rent or buy, and they can call the house where they live “home” rather than to have the roots they put down in the communities in which their children are going to school uprooted where a landlord wants a house back to sell on. Deputy Boyd Barrett referred earlier to the houses that are subject to HAP. There is not the same provision in that as there is in the rent assistance scheme where the local authority is obliged to find alternative accommodation if the landlord sells up. The worst of all worlds is the one in which people are moved to a transfer list, get a housing assistance payment but must find accommodation themselves if they are subject to eviction. We are starting to see this emerge as a problem. Deputy Boyd Barrett and I spoke about housing in the Dáil in 2012 and 2013 and it was a lonely place at that time, which was just after the crash. Our areas may well be the first in which one sees this type of thing come through. It is starting to present as a problem and making even the HAP option a very precarious one. A specific consideration is required from that point of view.

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