Dáil debates

Thursday, 11 October 2018

Financial Resolutions 2019 - Financial Resolution No. 4: General (Resumed)

 

2:30 pm

Photo of Darragh O'BrienDarragh O'Brien (Dublin Fingal, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I am pleased to be given the opportunity to respond to the budget. I will restrict my remarks to housing, planning and local government in which the Minister of State, Deputy Phelan, is involved. I was appointed as party spokesperson on the issue in May 2018. Since May I have endeavoured, along with my party, to be constructive in my approach and in dealings with the Government. We are in the midst of a housing crisis bordering on a national catastrophe. This crisis affects every family in the State. It affects them in different ways. First, it affects the more than 10,000 people who have no homes to go to. It affects the 4,000 kids sleeping in hotels, emergency accommodation, cars and Garda stations. It also affects the thousands of other people who are sleeping on couches and blow-up beds in their parents' houses. It affects the tens of thousands of working people who at this moment and until this budget, under the stewardship of this Government and the last, had no hope of owning or purchasing their own homes and ended up paying exorbitant rents of €2,000 or €2,500 per month in some instances for substandard accommodation.

Fianna Fáil's approach to this budget is to bring about some real policy solutions in that area. I was looking back at where we started, for example with social housing provision. Before we entered the confidence and supply agreement in 2016, the budget allocation for social housing was €430 million. Fianna Fáil has a track record in delivering social homes and public housing and in actually building houses. What we have done in that period of time is to pressurise the Government and insist it increases that budget, as it is today after this budget, to €1.34 billion. That is a 300% increase in provision for social homes. They are real homes for real people in this country.

When one looks at the scale of the crisis, we have about 72,000 families, a number that is increasing every day, waiting on our social housing waiting list. We have another 36,000 to 40,000 families on housing assistance payment, HAP. I will return to that. They are all waiting for permanent housing. I am pleased and satisfied that we secured nearly an extra €300 million, or a 25% increase, in the allocation for public homes. Everyone will agree, it is not about money and not even necessarily about policy; it is about delivery. It is about building those homes and housing those families. One of Fianna Fáil proposals was to lift the local authority - I use the word lightly - discretionary cap. There was some support from the Government benches on that. It was raised from €2 million to €6 million. It is a start. Effectively, €2 million means that any public housing scheme being built in the greater Dublin area, and most of the country, of over eight houses has to be referred to the Customs House for a famous four-stage process, which means 59 weeks of kicking it between Department and local authority. None of us wants that. The increase to €6 million will mean that, on average, schemes of up to about 30 homes will go through a one-stage process and give more autonomy to local authorities. I will be very honest. Fianna Fáil wanted to go further than that. We wanted to lift the cap to €10 million. It is something we will do. When and if we are in government, we will give more autonomy to the local authorities and hold them to account if they do not deliver. I want to see an end to the blame game between the Minister, Deputy Murphy, and the local authorities. One is blaming the other and now and again when the Minister is under pressure he decides to throw his toys out of the pram and blame every local authority for not delivering. We are all responsible. The Minister is responsible because at the end of the day he is the line Minister but everyone in the House is responsible for bringing forward policy that will make things better. That is why the affordable housing scheme is an important priority for Fianna Fáil. We believe that for people to have a stake in their communities and country, they need to have a home in it. They need to be able to put down roots and they need to have a secure environment to do so. The best way of doing that is by owning one's own home. The provision of €300 million over the next three years towards a real affordable housing scheme for working people is something that I and my colleagues, Deputy Michael McGrath and Deputy Barry Cowen in particular, have pushed for. I am pleased to see it is in this year's budget.

It is a pity none of our colleagues from Sinn Féin is here because they seem to have a major problem with maths on this. Deputy Eoin Ó Broin, their housing guru, effectively saw it as an increase of €25 million in one year. The Deputy obviously did not read the detail of it properly. It is actually a real increase in one year of €75 million - in fact, closer to €80 million - and a new €100 million for the next two years, totalling €300 million. What we need to see now is delivery of those homes. Initially it will be on State-owned land. Nine local authorities, including Fingal, have answered the call from the Department. We need to see this scheme starting in 2019. It has the potential with this funding to deliver about 7,500 homes for working people. Fianna Fáil would like to see that expanded. I would like to see an expansion of the Part V scheme as well as affordable housing. I want to see the income limits increased. We have to look at them. The €75,000 upper limit for a couple is too low in many areas. There are working couples earning more than that but they are paying exorbitant rents and childcare costs and have no ability to save. That needs to be done. We will be watching that really closely. The regulation for this affordable housing scheme should come to the House within the next two weeks. I want to see that happen quickly and the scheme established and that we start building these homes for people. As I said, we would expand it further if we were in government but we are not. We are trying to use our position here in a constructive way.

I say to those who are not present in the Chamber - Sinn Féin, the Labour Party and Solidarity-PBP - that I brought forward an affordable housing scheme back in May of this year that was debated in this House and for some reason it cannot explain the Government voted against it. Fine Gael opposed it but it was defeated because Sinn Féin, Solidarity, the Labour Party and others decided they were going to vote against affordable housing for working people. We have lost seven or eight months on that. That is a matter of regret but now I want to move forward and see it implemented. I would like to see other parties coming forward with real and realistic proposals and suggestions for implementation. People are sick and tired of housing being used as a political football. They want to see results. They care that there are 10,000 people without homes and 4,000 kids sleeping in hotels. I have met mothers who have explained to me in great detail how when their kids are getting out of the car coming back from school they get changed in the car because they do not want to walk into a hotel with a school uniform on. The reason they do not want to do that is because they know at six and seven years of age that the other guests in the hotel will know if they are wearing a school uniform that they are more than likely living and sleeping in that hotel. None of us wants to see that happen.

I called a number of weeks ago for an establishment of a time-bound task force on homelessness, particularly family homelessness. I was pleased to see in this budget, again at our insistence but, to be fair, with the agreement of the Government, an extra €60 million this year towards tackling homelessness and for emergency accommodation, and an increase up to about €130 million for next year. At the end of the day in all the areas of rent, affordable homes and public housing the big issue is supply and the other issue is affordability.

Unless we get supply back up and running, we will never get to grips with this crisis. The Government needs to show ambition in this regard, as does the Dáil. While an agency such as the Land Development Agency is required, the way in which this agency appears to have been constructed means we will not deliver a home within the next four years. We cannot wait four years; we need to do it sooner.

I was looking back at figures on home ownership. We have slipped to the lowest rate of home ownership since 1971. According to the latest figures from 2017, the average age of a person buying his or her own home is approximately 35 years of age. If one goes back to 1991, the average age was 26. Home ownership rate has now fallen to just over two thirds. It is a problem for many working people who pay rent but do not see any hope of getting out of it.

We also need to stabilise rents and ensure "landlord" is not a bad word. Some commentators bandy about the notion that landlords should be hung from every tree in this country, but that is not a practical measure and it should not happen. There are many good individual landlords in this market. I have a concern about the number of corporate, institutional landlords moving in which now own large swathes of this city and other cities around the country. We need to ensure individual landlords stay in the market because they are part of the solution, but we need to look at some way of incentivising longer-term leases to strengthen security of tenure for tenants. That can be done through the Finance Bill with additional measures we have discussed to ensure we keep landlords in the market because they have a role in this and they are part of the solution, albeit not the major part. People owning their own homes and public housing on public land are the major parts of the solution.

There are many aspects of the housing budget I welcome, many of which I am glad to say are Fianna Fáil proposals and policy positions. This coming year, however, it is about implementation. We need to see delivery on the ground. We need to see boots on the ground, sites started and people housed.

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