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

I thank the Chair of the committee for sharing time. We tried at the committee right throughout this debate to keep it non-partisan and non-political. That is one of the reasons the report has such strength. The speech from the Minister, Deputy Eoghan Murphy, however, was very disappointing. It was also disappointing that an almost identical speech was read by the Minister of State, Deputy McEntee, in effect reading the same speech a second time. It speaks to the problem where somebody tells us they agree with the principles of something but they do not agree with the practical proposals made. That often says that they do not really agree with the principles of the report. I accept that the Minister and all of the officials in the Department want to see the strongest possible building control regime. They want to ensure that we do not go back to the mistakes of the past.

The committee has not made these kinds of recommendations lightly nor have we made them without careful consideration of all of the information and opinions before us. Many of the recommendations in this report were recommended to us by experts in the field. It was on that basis that we made them. I want to make a few specific responses to the Minister's speech. Nobody proposed a new quango. Nobody on our committee wanted to set up a body for no reason. Just as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food Safety Authority of Ireland provide an exceptionally important service to the State, we fundamentally believe that a building control and consumer protection agency is needed. It could be a small and light agency, not unlike the other two that I have mentioned. It could provide real added value, not just to local authorities but also to homeowners who find themselves in properties with difficulties. It could provide the location for, as we said at the start, adequate provision of information. Non-judicial mediation and resolution are significant issues and are issues which, unfortunately, can and probably will arise in the future, although it is hoped nowhere near the scale that we have had.

On the issue of BCAR and the independence of assigned certifiers, and this is one of the things that has truly baffled me from the very start, we have never said in committee that the professionals who will work through the BCAR system are not fully professional and acting with integrity. They are, however, employed by the developer. That is the core of the difficulty which leads many of us to believe that it is another form of self-certification. There is not a clear separation between the builder, the architect that the builder employs and the assigned certifiers and design certifiers. Many of these people are part of the company of the architects employed by the developer. That is not fully independent. It is clearly better than the old system of certification off the plans, but it is not independent and that is why we have recommended the proposed change. We could have said scrap BCAR altogether. We could have said just directly employ local authority staff, but that was not a practical solution because there are assigned certifiers and design certifiers, many of whom are providing a very good quality service. It made no sense to discard that. Where a local authority feels that it could employ those people full time within the local authority, however, it should have that option. Where that is not necessary, it should be able to make the decisions about which assigned certifiers and designed certifiers are employed.

Legislative changes are a big problem. The idea that the industry is using latent defects insurance more now than before and therefore we do not need to make it mandatory does not make any sense. If everybody is doing it, then making it mandatory is not particularly controversial. If not everybody is doing it, however, that is all the more reason it should be mandatory. I welcome the fact that the Minister has asked the Law Reform Commission to look at other proposals we have made. These are eminently sensible ideas that exist in other jurisdictions and we should support them.

The biggest disagreement I have with the Minister is on the legacy issues and one of his concluding remarks. He said that the failures in the construction of the past arose largely because of inadequate design, poor workmanship or the use of improper products. I do not disagree with that. All of that is only possible, however, if the regulatory regime within which those things happened allowed them to happen, whether intentionally or unintentionally.

The very fact that the Building Control (Amendment) Regulations 2014 were introduced shows that the Government and the Department officials knew that the regulatory regime in place prior to 2014 was not up to scratch. Therefore, the State has some responsibility. We did not propose that the taxpayer would have to foot the bill for latent defects. All we asked is that the Department and the Minister would consider a redress scheme that could be industry funded and allow homeowners to offset the costs of fire safety or water ingress latent defects against tax liabilities or that there be consideration in respect of families who might not have the means to make the changes to have a taxpayer-funded option.

People living in certain properties and are facing bills, as Deputy Catherine Martin said, of €20,000, €30,000 or €40,000. Some of those individuals may have the money to cover the cost involved but they rightly believe they should not have to do so because what happened was not their fault. However, other people, including some of the people from Beacon South Quarter who met Deputies last night, do not have the money. They are receiving threatening letters from the management company. They are being denied access to car-parking facilities or to other aspects of the communal areas of the developments because they do not have the money to rectify a problem for which they were not responsible.

It is on that basis that the Government should explore the possibility of some form of a redress scheme. It is incumbent on the Minister to at least explore the proposal I have put forward regarding the setting up of a short, three-month public consultation to listen to the very sensible ideas many people have to put such a redress scheme in place in budget 2019 to take effect from next year. Many of us will be returning to that issue, both at the Joint Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government and in our direct engagements with the Minister and the staff of the Department.

I thank members of the committee and the staff of the committee secretariat. I also thank the officials from the Department who made themselves available to the committee and to me, as rapporteur, on many occasions in order that we fully understood the process. However, it is incumbent on us not to allow this report to simply sit on a shelf and gather dust. If even some of the changes we have proposed find their way into improving our building standards, building control and consumer protection regime, we will have done some service to those people who need our assistance and to home buyers into the future.

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