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

Mr. Eoin O'Sullivan and Ms Eileen Gleeson said the overwhelming majority of the 1,606 adults and children who had been removed from the monthly homeless reports last year were, at the time of their removal, homeless, accessing homeless services and had priority.

I have a long list of things I would replace in Rebuilding Ireland, as the Minister knows in quite some detail because he has had to listen to me talk about the issue at great length. He mentioned the help-to-buy scheme. The difficulty is that the Government's own commissioned report tells us that the majority of people who accessed the help-to-buy tax relief did not need it and that, therefore, it was not an effective use of the funds for the majority of people.

The Minister knows that I support the Rebuilding Ireland home loan scheme. In fact, local authority mortgages have been available for almost as long as the State has been in existence. The difficulty, for example, in Dublin where the average loan offer is €200,000, is that the vast majority of people who are being offered the loan cannot buy anything with it, which is why in Dublin the vast majority who have been offered the loan have not drawn it down.

It would make a difference to the social housing programme if the capital investment in social and affordable housing was doubled because it would double the output. The Minister is right that unless we tackle the overly bureaucratic approval, tendering and procurement process - Sinn Féin has made detailed proposals on how it could be done - it will not be speeded up. We have told him how it could be done. Local authority managers have come to the housing committee and outlined how it could be done, but the Minister has ignored our advice.

The rent pressure zones are not working. Rents have increased by 8% in Dublin in the past year. It is now €1,400 more expensive per year to rent in Dublin than it was a year ago. In fact, people effectively are now paying 13 months' rent, instead of 12. That is not a 4% cap on rental costs; rather, it is an abject failure. That applies to most counties where there are rent pressure zones. The alternative, of course, would be a rent freeze. I do not accept the arguments made by Fine Gael that such a freeze would make things worse.

My party has never argued that people should not have access to housing benefit, but it is the over-reliance on increasing the numbers entering the private rental sector, subsidised by the State, which is the policy problem. It is not a short-term issue; it has been an issue since Fianna Fáil's 1997 "Delivering homes, sustaining communities" housing plan. The aim has been to have a large body of people indefinitely in the private rental sector subsidised by the taxpayer. It is bad for the people concerned because it is a casualisation of social housing provision, but it is also bad for renters and first-time buyers who are not eligible for social housing support because it crowds them out of the market and pushes up prices.

The Minister criticised the Bill for its simplicity. While it is possible he said something I did not understand, the only proposal I heard from him was to give people with notices to quit a little more time. It is true that a little more time is good but it is an even more simplistic proposal than mine and, in the current market with rents increasing year on year, it will not address the problem. The one question the Minister did not answer is what he will do differently to stop the flow of families who are being legally evicted by landlords under pressure from banks to sell. That is the single greatest driver of family homelessness. If the Minister and Deputy Casey believe our proposal is wrong, the responsibility is on their parties to put in place an alternative. As neither of them has come to the debate with an alternative, however, the people who have the notices to quit in their hands tonight will receive nothing from us today and will remain faced with the prospect of homelessness in the coming weeks and months.

The other large gap in both the Minister's and the Deputy's contributions was what the Government will do about the disorderly exit of properties from the rental market. The Minister's main argument against my Bill is that it would make matters worse. More than 9,000 rental properties have left the market in the past year and a half, although we have not received the figures for the end of 2018 and, therefore, the figure is much higher. There is a disorderly exit of properties but nothing in what either Fine Gael or Fianna Fáil has said today will deal with that. I propose that we make it more difficult for those property owners to exit. The Minister is correct that in many cases they are selling as a result of mortgage distress, but now that there is some positive equity, under pressure from the bank or the fund, they are considering leaving. I want to make it more difficult for them to sell that property to anything other than another landlord as an emergency measure to stop the flow of families becoming homeless. If the basic choice is to say to the landlord that he or she will lose profit from the sale of the house by 10% or 20%, but if the social benefit to the State is that the family with children in that house will not become homeless, at this point that is a choice that the Oireachtas should make. If the Minister thinks differently, he should come to us with a proposal. Notwithstanding all the arguments and criticism, the Minister knows that when he comes to the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government, often based on Opposition proposals which have been passed by the Oireachtas, we respond and facilitate them. If he has some new idea to prevent families from becoming homeless that he has kept secret, he should let us know. If he has some mechanism to stem the disorderly exit of properties from the rental market, which is happening as a consequences of his policies, under his watch and that of his predecessor, he should come and speak to us about it and we will work with him. Until he has either of such proposals, however, I will continue to propose in the House what I believe are sensible, credible solutions, which is what the Opposition must do.

At some point, the Minister will have to accept that the policy he is pursuing is not working. I do not dispute the figures, which show that the rate of planning permission and home completions has increased, but we are not getting the right types of homes in the right places for those who are in need of social or affordable housing and, in particular, for those who are at risk of imminent homelessness. Until that core weakness of Rebuilding Ireland is adequately addressed, the crisis will get worse. At the very best, Rebuilding Ireland at the end of its five years will take us back to where we were in 2006 or 2007, with exceptionally high social housing waiting lists, exceptionally high levels of social welfare dependency in the private rented sector, anaemic outputs of social housing, and affordable housing schemes that trap people into high levels of mortgage repayments and increasing levels of mortgage distress.

I make no apologies for making the proposal. I am deeply disappointed, although not surprised, that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael continue to conspire to prevent adequate solutions being brought forward. As I stated earlier, if either of the parties who remain in the Chamber has better ways of dealing with the specific problem I have raised, we will work with it. Today, however, they have not proposed any better ways. For the families in emergency accommodation tonight, with notices to quit in the private rented sector, the Minister has offered them no comfort, solutions or hope in respect of that specific problem they face, which is deeply disappointing.

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