Brendan Ryan (Dublin Fingal, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Despite the best efforts of the Government, landlords continue to dance around, or through, attempts at increasing security of tenure for renters. We believe that if enacted, and not just accepted, this Bill would be a real tenants' Bill. The measures in the Bill provide real protections for tenants, as outlined by Deputy O'Sullivan.

The housing crisis is not abating and I am concerned that there has been a definite shift by the Government towards the private rental sector and the private market as a means of solving this crisis. We need a State-led approach that focuses on building not on leasing. The focus should minimise any need to enter the private market to buy homes and in doing so competing with regular people, which I know is happening also.

While many renters find themselves at the coal face of this crisis, we need to put in place further emergency measures as exist in this Bill to protect them. When one is on the front line of the housing crisis dealing with people day in, day out, as many Members do, it never ceases to amaze the measures landlords undertake to end good tenancies for the goal of increased profit.

The problem is that the attempt to start building local authority housing in 2014 and 2015 as part of a real State-led approach to the housing crisis was halted and the focus has shifted too greatly towards the housing assistance payment, HAP and to the landlord-led solution. This compounds the housing crisis and keeps people in bed and breakfast accommodation and in family hubs.

Will the Minister tell the House why Fingal County Council housing projects that began the planning process in 2015 still do not have a shovel in the ground? Some have been finished, but it took three years to build nine houses in Balrothery, County Dublin, which the Minister of State, Deputy English, recently officially opened. It is four years since construction started on 70 houses in Lusk. Meanwhile, projects in Swords and Balbriggan that began in 2014 and 2015 have made had no progress at all. In the past two years, there has been next to no council house developments going to planning. It seems there is an ideological shift back to the solution of Part V properties and private rental accommodation from landlords. I put it to the Minister that this is not good enough.

Some landlords are running rings around the regulations. Fingal, for example, is in the rent pressure zone but many tenants are not aware of this and they engage in new rental agreements over and above the 4% limits, petrified that if they do not they will end up in a hotel or in bed and breakfast accommodation.

Our Bill calls for the entire State to be designated a rent pressure zone for a period of three years. This needs to be hammered home. I have had a case in Fingal in which a landlord gave notice to tenants that they had to leave as the house needed to be remediated for pyrite. One of the tenants accepted the notice and moved out. Within a week, there was a new tenant in place, no doubt paying a higher rent, and no pyrite remediation works had started because the house did not have a pyrite problem. This is the kind of stuff that is going on. The landlord lied. He got his tenants out and is, no doubt, reaping financial benefit from this unscrupulous decision.

There are many complex effects of the housing crisis. I have written to the Minister, Deputy Eoghan Murphy, and I have pursued the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection about a case in which a person on invalidity pension had the household benefits package removed because she took her grown up son and family back into the family home due to them being made homeless. This person and her husband are doing the State a great service by providing short-term secure accommodation to their son and his family, which is what people are directed to do; stay with family and friends. They are saved from being a burden on the State and another homeless statistic. It seems somewhat cruel that they have their household benefits package removed as a result of this.

It would be a very simple solution, with a meagre cost to the State, if the Minister, Deputy Eoghan Murphy, and the Minister for Employment Affairs and Social Protection allowed a 12 month grace period for people to keep their secondary benefits should they take in a direct family member who has been made homeless. If the person can provide a validated termination notice and a statutory declaration from the landlord, which all tenants are required to have as part of the termination notice, this should satisfy the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection without impacting on administrative resources.

I note that the Government is not opposing this Bill but what does this actually mean? I believe this is a political manoeuvre, performed on a regular basis, to avoid the Government getting a bad headline on a Wednesday or Thursday morning. There appears to be no appetite to move these Bills forward. By accepting it, the Government looks like noble practitioners of new politics but in reality it is merely allowing Bills to enter a metaphorical room from which they will never emerge and move on.

This is new politics but it is not good politics. As he is not opposing the Bill, I ask the Minister to either move it along swiftly through the legislative process or bring forward his own Bill which incorporates its contents.

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