Shane Cassells (Meath West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Fianna Fáil supports this Bill, which is a small measure to regulate a sector that Government policy has neglected. I agree with the Minister that approved housing bodies have an essential role to play in providing new housing units.

However, they are constrained by the EUROSTAT decision that limits their borrowing capacity. The Government has also failed to set out a path to get off balance sheet, as is usual in most EU countries, and has failed to set up a special purpose vehicle to allow credit unions to invest in approved housing bodies, AHBs.

We support the Bill and AHBs. Last October, this issue was under scrutiny by me and other members of the Committee of Public Accounts. In his special chapter, the Comptroller and Auditor General pointed out that by mid-2018, just 246 AHBs, or some 45%, out of 547 that were in operation at the time had registered with the Department so regulation is welcome because the management and oversight of the funding provided to AHBs is complex as it is provided under a number of schemes. Because of the scale of the operation of some AHBs, they are in receipt of more than one type of funding from more than one local authority. As was pointed out during that session with members of the Department who were present on the day, the funding is significant. I know that when we examined the 2017 accounts at the Committee of Public Accounts, funding of €180 million was flowing through from the Department to AHBs on schemes available exclusively to them. The examination by the Local Government Audit Service in 2015 identified a number of areas where oversight of AHBs by local authorities could be improved. When we examined it, we found that between 2013 and 2017, €648 million was provided to AHBs with no review of operations during that period so the pressing need for regulation and a regulator was evident, particularly when one considers that in his report, the Comptroller and Auditor pointed out that when he tried to match the scheme expenditure with output data, he found that the Department did not report output on a scheme-by-scheme basis. He also found that the Department did not report the size of the social housing stock. It had figures for local authority stock but not for social housing held by approved AHBs. It was also very evident that a large number of AHBs were inactive but retained approved status. I welcome the work of the Department in tidying up the register prior to this legislation coming forward, as was recommended by the Comptroller and Auditor General and sought at that time.

We are supportive of the Bill. The need for it is clear given the significant sums of money involved in an area that is so important. I return to my opening comments, which are that this is a small measure in a sector that has been neglected and that housing policy in this country has been characterised by falling home ownership levels and missed targets on social housing. In 1991, the average age at which a person bought his or her first home was 26. I was that age in 2005 when I bought my home. In 2016, the average age was 35. House prices have risen by 90% since 2012 while incomes have risen by 7% during that same period. Home ownership levels have slipped to record lows of 67% across the country, down from a high of 82% in 2004. The Government's strategy has mired social housing projects in red tape and ignored the issue of credit union funding. We say that AHBs must play a central role in resolving the housing crisis but the Government has also failed to address the EUROSTAT ruling that limits AHBs future growth. We must move away from relying on the private sector and remove red tape for local authorities and AHBs to allow them to get to grips with the housing crisis.

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