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

I warmly welcome and fully support the Labour Party Bill tabled by Deputy Jan O'Sullivan. Most of the measures in the Bill are eminently sensible and should have been made law back in 2016 when we were debating the Government's Residential Tenancies (Amendment) Bill. The Minister is not opposing this Bill today but he should sit down with Deputy O'Sullivan and other members of the Oireachtas Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government and work this Bill's provisions into the upcoming Residential Tenancies (Amendment) Bill 2018 - not the second one that will come later in the year but the one that is due earlier in the summer. When one looks at the proposals in the Bill, there is simply no reason not to support them.

If one takes the definition of a landlord, the idea that a receiver who is accepting rent from a tenant, having been appointed by a bank on repossession, should not have all of the obligations of a landlord and that the tenant should not have the same protections under the Residential Tenancies Act makes no sense. Good receivers are already doing it. That is already the voluntary practice of the good receivers out there. Some people have suggested that if the Residential Tenancies Act was tested, it would be found that receivers are included but why wait for that to happen? We should just legislate for it.

In terms of the provision that a deposit should not exceed one month's rent, one must ask why landlords are currently seeking more than that. They are doing that to avoid a criminal sanction for refusing tenants in receipt of the housing assistance payment, HAP. They know now, because of the changes in law which we supported, that if they refuse tenants in receipt of social housing support they can be taken to the Workplace Relations Commission, WRC. They cannot refuse tenants on those grounds and this is the way they are doing it. By not supporting this measure and including it in its own legislation, the Government is colluding with landlords who are refusing to accept social housing support tenants in HAP, RAS and other schemes. That is something that is not supportable.

On rent certainty, I say again what I said at the time that the legislation was introduced, namely that the idea that it is acceptable to allow a landlord to increase rent over three years by 12.5% in current market conditions is simply not on. This is not 4%. It allows for 4% plus an additional bit of interest over three years and the extra thousands of euro that will cost working and modest income families is simply money they do not have.

I am very surprised that whoever wrote the Minister's script suggested that applying rent pressure zones State-wide would be unconstitutional. It can only be unconstitutional if the measure was arbitrary and disproportionate. The RTB's own rent index for the fourth quarter of last year showed that in Sligo, which is not in the rent pressure zones, the annual increase in rent was 29%. Other areas that are not deemed to be rent pressure zones include Limerick, where the increase was 10%, Waterford city where the increase was 7.4%, while Mayo and Westmeath saw increases of 13%. Clearly, there is a strong argument that given the disproportionately high levels of rent increases in those places, it would be completely constitutional to apply the rent pressure zones provisions to them. If the Government will not do that, I ask that it would at least do what we have been requesting for more than a year, namely, allow the rent pressure zones to be calculated in those urban areas at electoral division rather than local electoral area so that we can incorporate those parts of Limerick city, Waterford city and Sligo town that are outside of the scheme currently.

I fully support the restrictions on the notice to quit. Deputy Curran put it best when he described the huge difference between the commercial and the residential rental sectors so I will not go into that further. Obviously, the deposit protection scheme is not just good for tenants and landlords. It would also save a huge amount of the time currently spent by the RTB on deposit retention cases. Further, it would generate some additional income for the State because all of those deposits would be held in an escrow account and the interest would accrue to the RTB. That additional income could be used to assist with the exercising of the new policing powers that the Government is about to give to the board.

All of this is about fairness for tenants. It is about providing better security of tenure and preventing homelessness. I join Deputy Jan O'Sullivan in commending the four NGOs for publishing their hidden homelessness report today. There is an overlap between the problems this Bill is attempting to address and the people who were spoken about so eloquently by the NGOs today. I echo strongly the point made by Deputy Darragh O'Brien earlier. The Government will be coming to the Oireachtas committee in a couple of weeks with a new Bill. It is a Bill that we support and we have all said clearly at committee that it contains measures for which many of us have argued. I urge the Government to put some of these measures into that Bill, the ones that are not complicated, are relatively straightforward and which can be progressed quickly. If the Government does that, it will have even more enthusiastic support from the Opposition. If it does not do that, just as if it refuses to address the issue of student rents, then Members of the Opposition will sit down together, table joint amendments and then force those amendments on to the Government. It would be much better if the officials in the Department, using their expertise, crafted those amendments. Indeed, we are happy to meet them and work with them beforehand. I urge the Government to do this properly and provide tenants with the protections they so rightly deserve.

See this speech in context