Eoghan Murphy (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy for tabling this Bill. I welcome the opportunity to speak on housing. It is an opportunity this House has every week and we must use it because it is a crisis. It is an emergency, as the Taoiseach has recognised. I very much welcome the spirit of the Bill. It has been tabled in an attempt to help people who are really suffering. All the Deputies in this House know that people are suffering with rents they cannot afford, with insecure accommodation and a fear of homelessness, and the people in emergency accommodation of whom there are far too many. The scale of the crisis is incredible. I recognise that the spirit and intention behind this Bill is to try to help.

In the context of the rental market, the daft.iereport was published this week. We also have the Residential Tenancies Board, RTB, report, which is from a larger dataset. They tell us the same story about a trend particularly in the rental sector, with rents being unacceptably high for people and putting people to the pin of their collars.

Unfortunately, the Government will be opposing the Bill. There are a number of technical complications in the drafting of the Bill that we could not support and that could not be fixed on Committee Stage. There are also a number of constitutional difficulties with the Bill. Even if we could overcome those two hurdles, concrete ideas are put forward in this Bill that would do more harm than good. There are unintended consequences that have not been properly thought through. People will come forward with an idea to deal with a particular problem or aspect of our housing crisis and it might do somebody some good at that moment but we must be aware of the unintended consequences which they have not thought of or considered that would ripple through and, potentially, cause more harm than good.

The Taoiseach has said that this is an emergency and the Bill refers to declaring an emergency. We must ask whether the absence of a formal declaration of an emergency prevents us from putting in place emergency responses. No, it does not because we have already put in place emergency responses. One example is the change in planning law. The Deputy who introduced this Bill knows the importance of planning law. I am sure all the Deputies are in constituencies where objections have been submitted in respect of different types of developments. We know the importance of the right of individuals to be able to make their observations known when planning applications are submitted and yet we have put in place an emergency response in respect of fast-track planning.

Another way we could look at the question regarding the formal declaration of an emergency is in terms of whether such a declaration allows us to do something that we are not already doing. The answer to that is "No, it could not". I have already looked at this and I have spoken to the Attorney General on this. For example, in the area of procurement law, if we could go outside of procurement, we could fast-track the delivery of housing, with supply being the fundamental issue, and get that done more quickly than at present. However, EU law in this area is solid and cannot, even with the declaration of an emergency, be ignored. That law was put in place to protect the public good because there are and can be - we have seen this in the past - negative consequences when people ignore procurement law or go around it.

Another issue is that relating to constitutional protections. Would the declaration of an emergency allow us to ignore certain aspects of the Constitution? No, it would not. This does not mean that we cannot, in the context of the Constitution and the existing interpretations of it, rebalance rights away from the individual and towards the collective because we recognise that there is an emergency, but we cannot trample on those individual rights altogether. I will provide brief examples of where we have rebalanced these constitutional rights. The vacant site levy is one such example. We have imposed a levy in respect of certain people's property - the property they own - because we care not happy with the way they are using or not using it as is the case may be. Another example of where we have rebalanced those rights is the introduction of rent pressure zones and rent caps, with the putting in place of a restriction on what a person can charge for something he or she owns. Rental reforms have been made and more will be made. These will further limit the ways in which people use property they own. We can rebalance rights in the context of the Constitution but we cannot trample on them at the same time.

The absence of a formal declaration of an emergency has not prevented us from putting in place emergency responses. I mentioned the fast-track planning process. This has seen planning approval been granted for thousands of new homes in the three-month timeframe that has been put in place. The help-to-buy scheme to assist first-time buyers is a temporary emergency response. The establishment of Home Building Finance Ireland is a temporary response which recognises the scale of the emergency in one part of our housing sector whereby small builders still cannot obtain money to build those small clusters of homes that we need built in many areas. Family hubs are an emergency response because we recognise that hotel accommodation is not suitable for families. The Housing First programme is a response to the emergency that exists and that will be with us for some time because the complexity of individual people in homelessness is one that takes years to resolve. More than 200 tenancies have been created through the Housing First programme and between 80% to 90% of the people who have taken up those tenancies have not fallen back into homelessness. It takes people out and keeps them out of emergency accommodation.

The rent caps are a temporary response we have put in place because there is not enough supply in the rental market. The housing assistance payment, HAP, is a new form of social support for people in the private rental market. It provides for a discretion of 20% above prices and a homeless HAP discretion of 50% above prices, recognising the emergency that people are facing in trying to meet their bills and the fact that rent prices are too high. Unfortunately, this means that the Government has to pay more until more homes are built. Regulating short-term lets would be a longer term measure, again recognising the fact that there is not enough housing stock. The initial response we took more than two years ago was to ring-fence €6 billion in funding to deliver 50,000 homes into the stock of social housing to facilitate the production of at least 25,000 homes in that period, and building up to 110,000 social housing homes under Project Ireland 2040. In all these measures we have taken, we recognise the emergency that exists and the severe difficulty in which people have been placed. The Government and the Oireachtas are doing everything possible to put in place supports that can protect those people in this time of crisis.

The Bill refers to the emergency continuing for three years after its enactment. I would welcome that time horizon because it recognises that this could not be solved overnight, even if we put in place additional responses. Those the Deputy outlined are quite radical and, unfortunately, unconstitutional. He refers to a three-year period that would bring us to the end of 2021, which is the time horizon for Rebuilding Ireland. The latter is a five or six-year plan that we have put in place to bring about real reform of the rental sector and introduce measures such as those relating to the cost-rental scheme. I have spoken of the number of homes that need to built and the thousands of people and families who we have prevented from entering into emergency accommodation as a result of the different programmes that have been put in place under Rebuilding Ireland. Thousands more will exit emergency accommodation during the period of the plan. The Bill refers to a review at the end of the three-year period. In Project Ireland 2040, we have already looked beyond 2021 and committed to the delivery of those 110,000 homes in the period to 2027. That is approximately 12,000 homes per year going into the stock of social housing after 2021. A huge amount has already been planned and prepared in order to ensure that when we exit this particular period of crisis, we will not fall into another crisis in the future. We will also ensure that no matter what is happening in the wider economy - and there will be shocks in the future - we will never stop the State producing homes into the stock of social housing on local authority land. That is very important.

I want to briefly go through some of the proposals in the Bill. One of its provisions seeks to prohibit evictions. We must be careful about the language used. An eviction is very different from a notice of termination. Evictions happen when people are not paying their rent or when there has been damage to the property. Evictions are enforced through the courts. Evictions are not the main source of people entering emergency accommodation but we know that one of the sources is in circumstances where notices of termination are served. In introducing his Bill, the Deputy is trying to help people and ensure that the do not find themselves in that precarious position whereby they have to find somewhere new to live. Too many people are in that situation but to put in place such a provision could dramatically reduce the supply of homes available to rent. The rental sector is a part of the solution and we have more homes in the rental sectors not fewer. We can give greater protections to renters through rent transparency, for which provision will be made in the Bill I will publish shortly. We can give independent enforcement powers to the RTB so that renters do not have to worry about their positions, the RTB will do so for them. We can give longer notice to quit periods so that individual renters will have has a greater period to find a new place to live when a notice of termination is served. The Government's new Bill will do all of these things.

This Bill before the house seeks to freeze rents but we have to consider the unintended consequences to which this could give rise and which could do more harm than good. Almost all economists agree that when one freezes rents in an economy or even in a particular geographic location, it undermines the supply of homes. People also stay in their existing arrangements and there is less movement in the market. A rental market needs movement. Two people meet each other, they come together as a couple and move from having two homes to having one and that frees up one home, or two people in a relationship fall out of that relationship and need to move somewhere else and find a new place to live. Economists who have looked at rent freezes see that this churn does not happen and that this prevents new people from entering into the market as they move to a country, come of working age or move to a different part of a country. All these things have happened. They have been tried and they have failed.

Another trend we see - and which means that rent freezes are not a social good - is that people who could afford to pay more are not obliged to do so. This means that their potential rent increases are subsided by individuals who are earning less. That is not socially desirable. It is another unintended consequence of rent freezes. However, we can and we have put rent caps in place. We have capped rent increases at 4% per annum in rent pressure zones. These have worked but they need to work better and we need to do more to ensure that this happens. The Bill I will introduce in the near future will see to that. It will strengthen rent pressure zones, make it a serious offence to be in breach of the rules relating to them and give the RTB more powers and resources to properly police them.

This Bill we are discussing also seeks to reduce all rents very dramatically. However, 70% to 80% of our landlords own only one or two properties. Many of them are accidental landlords because of the economic crash that we experienced. They need fair rents in order to be able to cover the investments they have made. They may have mortgages on second properties and those properties might be leveraged against their homes. The unintended consequences of doing what is proposed would be to undermine those people's housing security. It could make our homelessness crisis worse and it could also reduce the number of properties available to rent.

I know that rents are too high, that supply is still too low and that renters need greater protections.

We do not need to declare an emergency as a potentially tokenistic response. We can actually put in place greater protections without doing that. It is not the case that declaring an emergency would allow us to do things we cannot already do. We will do those things to fix these problems. We will do everything we can to help get people out of emergency accommodation more quickly than we already are and to prevent people from having to enter into emergency accommodation. We will do more and we will do better.

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