Dáil debates

Wednesday, 10 April 2019

Building the Housing of the Future: Motion [Private Members]

 

2:20 pm

Photo of Willie PenroseWillie Penrose (Longford-Westmeath, Labour) | Oireachtas source

This motion is timely and appropriate and comprehensive in its nature and extent. I compliment my colleague, Deputy Jan O'Sullivan on bringing it forward. She has worked hard to develop a very comprehensive policy, Affordable Housing for All.

I am very lucky and indeed proud to be the eldest of ten who were reared in a local authority house, as were many in my extended family. I speak on this motion with a detailed knowledge but maybe not everybody can. When we got the house in 1960 there was no water, there were outdoor toilets. That is why I have never had any problem with paying for water. We brought it down by hand in 1972 and we handed it over to the local authority to charge us. As a young lad, I went away to earn money to build on additional rooms and a toilet and to bring the outdoor toilet in. I have a very deep affinity with local authority housing because I know what it means, as does my extended family.

I am proud that the Labour Party has always been very committed to the provision of public housing. We bring forward this motion, based on our comprehensive housing analysis which would see 80,000 homes built over five years. Our housing policies are practical, implementable, fully-costed and place the State at the centre of activity on housing. That is where it should be, the State has to be the fulcrum and focus of a comprehensive housing building programme. The role of State agencies, leading the delivery of housing, as they have done through Ireland's history, seems lost on the current Government. It gets lost in debate. That was a central function of local authorities and it should remain so. Every local authority should have a landbank such that houses would be built in many villages, which would make a substantial contribution to reducing the number of applicants. It would sustain rural Ireland and the villages that are in decline and the shops and churches and sports clubs that are under pressure.

Our motion today aims to make the Government face up to the realities faced by hundreds of thousands of people in Ireland right now. Rents are way beyond the ability of many workers to pay. Council housing waiting lists have gone through the roof and tens of thousands of people are unable to heat their homes adequately.

I want to focus particularly on this point. Tackling fuel poverty is a priority for the Labour Party and that is why we have included this right in the heart of the motion. Residential use of energy such as oil, gas and solid fuels accounts for 9.5% of all our carbon emissions. That is around 5.7 million tonnes of greenhouse gases annually. That has to be halved by 2030, which means a massive drive for home energy efficiency. If we do this right, we can eliminate fuel poverty at the same time as lowering carbon emissions so we will get two bangs for one buck. From recent surveys we know that around 75,000 households, or 4.4%, are unable to afford to keep their homes adequately warm and around 138,000 households, or 8.1%, go without heating at some point during the year. We know that elderly people or people with disabilities require more home heating, because they spend more time at home. Yet they often have the lowest incomes and they are on fixed incomes so they are in significant difficulties. The Government did not introduce regulations in relation to energy efficiency until 1979, and it must be remembered that nearly half of current housing stock was built before that date. Significant thermal retrofits were not introduced until 2006, meaning that most Irish homes are not properly insulated. That raises the cost of heating and it also means more carbon emissions to achieve the same level of heating.

There is plenty of action that can be taken by the Government to address this issue. If we do not already have this information, we should require every local council to report on the energy ratings of all its housing stock. Everyone in public housing should have a fair expectation of a home that they can heat to a decent standard of comfort. They are entitled to the same as what everybody else has in society. Every home under local authority control should be put into a programme to upgrade and retrofit any home that does not have adequate insulation. There are some programmes out there that aim to do this but they are far too slow and they lack focus. Retrofitting homes will help the residents tackle the cost of heating and will also lower carbon emissions.

All future public housing should be built to a much higher housing standard. This is to avoid the problems that beset social housing in the 1970s and also to ensure that we are serious about reducing our carbon emissions. Housing standards for public housing should include a wide range of measures to ensure the lowest possible carbon footprint from housebuilding and the lifetime use of housing. This should include insulation, computer controlled energy efficient heating systems, local energy generation from solar panels and the reuse of rainwater. Indeed, the collection and reuse of rainwater should be part of planning permissions going forward across all areas and it would be very constructive to do so.

When it comes to delivering more housing, of course we need to increase the supply in every way possible. It all boils down to supply. There have been attempts to privatise the provision of local authority housing. It has not worked, it does not work and it should never be contemplated that it will work. There are 1,701 people on the housing list in County Westmeath today. In addition, there are 800 who have HAP and RAS tenancies and who are on the transfer list. Effectively, those people are entitled to be housed and 500 people are in need of housing in other areas. We know from our clinics that we effectively have about 2,500 people on the housing list in Westmeath. To meet their needs, and to solve the wider housing problem, we just need to think outside the box.

I was canvassing recently and every evening I come back and I notice about three or four houses unoccupied across the area. I am sure any Deputy in a rural area has seen the same. That is every evening so if I was out for 30 evenings that comes to 90 houses. I know every Deputy has similar houses in their areas. We could do more to bring these privately owned vacant houses back into use. Very often they are left to somebody and they do not have the money to carry out the repairs. Hundreds of millions of euro are being spent on rent supplement and HAP and some of this money could be diverted into making vacant houses habitable. The houses I am talking about could be made habitable for maybe €30,000 or €40,000. There is no free lunch, if we give them a €40,000 grant we will do so on the condition that they take on local authority tenants and maintain them for seven years on a contract. A house would be brought back into habitation that might have been left to them by their grandfather, father or uncle which they did not have the money to renovate.

Let us think outside the box and let us not always be prisoners of bureaucracy. I know what that Department is like. I was only in it for eight or nine months. If I was in it for a few years I probably would have ended up in an asylum because I could not stick the bureaucracy. It is as simple as that. I had to leave on a point of principle on another matter but if I did not leave on that I would have gone on another reason because I could not stick bureaucracy always coming in and putting the heavy hand down on top of me. I am somebody who comes from an ordinary working class family who resents that so unfortunately I am anti-bureaucratic. Maybe I am in trouble over saying that but so be it. I will be gone out of here and they cannot do anything with me after that anyway.

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