Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

The issue of housing is coming up at people's doors right across the country, particularly in my city of Dublin. My assessment is the Government has completely lost the trust of the Irish people in this regard. Political capital is an uncertain currency but we all know that it eventually disappears. It is evaporating for the Government at present in the context of the housing issue. This is because the Government is betting everything on a market that is not reliable. This has echoes of other debates that are taking place.

Regarding the HAP scheme, on which the Government has been relying, it is interesting to go back to the spending review by the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform from July 2018. Similar to the broadband one, it seems that the Department is critical. It said that it is estimated based on local authority areas analysed that the net present cost of delivering units through mechanisms such as HAP, RAS and leasing is higher than building or acquisition. Similarly, the leasing schemes the Government is promoting are very similar to the national broadband scheme. It is effectively saying to private developers that they have a no-risk guaranteed income for 25 years and at the end of it, they will own the asset - public housing that is being privatised. In respect of the reliance on the market, Mel Reynolds, with whom I spoke because he is probably the best person to throw light on what is happening with the real numbers, estimates today that we are still relying on the market for about 95% or 94% of all housing. Even with regard to the approved housing bodies and local authorities, they are conflating, as the national audit committee said last year, turnkey purchases with new build. We are relying on the market. From talking to people in the industry, it is clear that conditions in the market are starting to change and there is a real risk that if the capital leaves or the cost of capital goes up, that market will not deliver.

It is welcome to hear that the Irish Council for Social Housing has issued a report this morning that details the number of houses built last year but we must really analyse the figures to realise that the real numbers of real builds by the State is a fraction of what the headline figures would have us think. The council has two asks. First, it says that the Land Development Agency legislation should be produced straightaway and I agree. It was launched prematurely last September, probably for political reasons. Again, this is typical of Fine Gael. The Irish Council for Social Housing is saying that it must be issued quickly. Its second ask that we use State land extensively for the delivery of social and affordable rental housing.

Will the Government recognise that its way is broken and that it must change and that the way we could do that is to tell the Land Development Agency that on all State lands it will use, we should aim to have 50% affordable cost-rental housing, which will bring down market rents, and 50% social housing? That provides opportunity and a sense of hope not just for those who are homeless but those hundreds of thousands of young people and their parents and grandparents who have no sense of any possible future and who are paying through the nose in rent. Will the Taoiseach direct the Land Development Agency to pursue the policy his own party says it supports, namely, cost-rental affordable housing, and move away from a reliance on the market that is killing a sense of future in this country and costing us a fortune?

See this speech in context