Jan O'Sullivan (Limerick City, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Unfortunately, Fine Gael's ideology shines right through the budget which it has prepared with the collusion of Fianna Fáil and the complete invisibility of any influence from the Independent Alliance. I will go through some of it to explain why I say this. First, the poor lose and the banks win. An extra €250 million could have been taken through the bank levy, on which we voted last night. The Labour Party opposed the levy on the banks remaining the same because of the fact that they are in profit and our need for them to contribute as a matter of urgency to the economy now that we face Brexit, the demands of climate change and major crises in housing and health. While it was right to frame a budget that set money aside to protect us from Brexit, the banks could surely have contributed to some extent to all of it. On the other hand, poor people are contributing because their cost of living will go up. They have received no increase, whether they are carers, people with disabilities, unemployed or pensioners. There was absolutely nothing for them. The rise in the minimum wage to €10.10 has been put off until later next year. Poorer workers are, therefore, going to lose. The poor lose and the banks win.

I refer, in particular, to carers. With others, I recently attended a briefing in the AV room on behalf of carers. Their demands were modest and could have been addressed. An obvious issue is that the basic €5 was not added to social welfare payments. My Limerick colleague, Deputy Willie O'Dea, was unable to use his influence under the confidence and supply agreement to achieve it this year, which is unfortunate. There were other demands by carers which should have been addressed. One was related to the income threshold. There are thousands of people caring for loved ones on a full-time basis who receive no carer's allowance because their income is above the income threshold. That is something that could have been addressed. It would have been worth doing if ideology had not come into it and ensured they had got nothing to help them with the increased cost of living, while the banks were allowed to go off happily laughing at us for bailing them out. They can get on with their business, while pressing homeowners in mortgage distress and others who depend on them for some access to funding.

Another example is the failure to increase the minimum wage. There are people on the minimum wage who will not be able to afford to pay for the basics in the coming years. I refer, in particular, to childcare workers. While there will be some package in the budget in respect of the cost of childcare, I do not know whether it will be of great help. It has been a long time coming and was, in fact, promised last year. However, it was still not implemented. One can see from SIPTU's Big Start campaign and research on childcare that workers in the sector are mostly female and extremely badly paid while doing an important job. Increasing the minimum wage would have helped these workers. When he was responding to my party leader, Deputy Howlin, during Leaders' Questions this morning as to why failing to increase the minimum wage would not cause hardship, the Taoiseach referred to the fact that a lot of people on the minimum wage earned the second income in their household. Most of them are women. Why should women be left stuck on the minimum wage just because they do not have as much income as their husbands or partners? It was a particularly illustrative comment as to from where the Taoiseach was coming on the issue. I do not know if it was picked up on, given that the remark was something of an aside. However, it indicates the thinking that these workers do not really matter. They are working in childcare or other jobs that pay low wages. The lower paid segments of the economy tend to employ women and we are aware of the gender pay gap.

I support what Deputy Louise O'Reilly said about another women's issue, namely, access to a free, comprehensive contraception service which includes the supply of long acting contraceptives. We need a comprehensive programme. To be fair to the Minister for Health, Deputy Harris, he has set up a working group on the matter within the Department, but it needs to be delivered. It was a key ancillary recommendation of the committee on the eighth amendment, but there was nothing in the budget about delivering it.

I come back to the ideology. Again, the private sector has won over the public sector. The Fianna Fáil win on the National Treatment Purchase Fund benefits the private sector, rather than the public health sector. I refer, in particular, to housing. There are many issues with the ideology on housing of the Government that must be pointed out. I looked at what happened at O'Devaney Gardens in the Dublin City Council local authority area this week. The policy is clearly skewed towards private profit. Publicly owned lands are to be used to provide a massive profit in the value of the land to private developers. That is how the model has changed under Fine Gael. It places councillors in a difficult position. They are told to take it or leave it, but it was not always like that. I want to take a little time to go back over the history. I visited the various Dublin regeneration projects on 12 December 2012 when I was a Minister of State. A couple were moving well, including those in Dolphin's Barn and St. Teresa's Gardens. One of the projects I visited was in O'Devaney Gardens. At that stage there was an option for the local authority to lead the redevelopment. Instead, the land was sat on until it increased in value and the proposal now made is skewed completely towards private developers. It is a fundamental change in policy.

I have looked back at the housing action report published by my colleague, Deputy Alan Kelly, when he was leaving the then Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government in 2016. When I was in government, we had hardly any money. However, we funded the voids programme and I received a very small budget for public housing at the very end of my time as Minister of State. As soon as the economy started to recover, Deputy Howlin decided as Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform with Government agreement to allocate €4 billion for housing. There is an appendix at the back of the housing action report which sets out the housing developments approved in 2015 and 2016. I know the ones in my constituency and I am sure other Members can look at the list to see what was delivered or not as the case may be in theirs. These were public social housing developments for which money was allocated. One development of 40 homes in Clonmacken in Limerick is only now beginning, even though it was approved in May 2015, but there is nothing on the ground as yet. There is no sign of the development of 21 homes in Castletroy. A 21-home development planned for Drominbeg, Rhebogue, has yet to start, mainly because of the campaign against it led by a local authority member from Fianna Fáil. It was to be developed by a housing co-operative. One scheme has been delivered at Speaker's Corner on Hyde Road. It comprises four units for Simon. The 11-home scheme planned for Shelbourne Square on the North Circular Road has not been delivered. That is the list for my constituency. I do not know if it is as bad anywhere else. I am not trying to knock Limerick City and County Council, but it shows that the ideology changed and that public housing was not delivered in the way that was needed. Looking back, I need to explain that it is an ideological issue.

The HAP scheme was introduced when I was Minister of State with responsibility for housing. Some €400,000 was spent on HAP in 2014. That amount has now gone up to more than €750 million, between this scheme and other means of transferring money to private landlords.

HAP was established when we were starting to recover from the economic collapse and people were starting to get jobs. Many people were on rent supplement and, if they went to work, they lost all of their housing support. HAP was part of the action plan for jobs and its purpose was to protect people who could go back to work and make it payable for them to do so. Some people would not go back to work because they would lose all their housing support. It was never intended to be a substitute for public housing but that is what it has become.

I am disturbed that we had the same speech from the Minister as last year. I read last year's speech and the headlines are the same. For example, "affordability" was one headline but there is no affordable housing. Even the O'Devaney Gardens proposal puts paid to the notion of so-called affordable homes. One would have to be earning approximately €150,000 per year to afford a home. There is no affordability.

I read the summary of Rebuilding Ireland's action plan for housing and homelessness that was published in 2016. Its stated aims included addressing the unacceptable number of households, particularly families, in emergency accommodation. There are more than 10,000 now in emergency accommodation so that position has worsened. The Government at the time promised to get people out of hotels by the following July, which never happened. Another aim of the action plan was to moderate rental and purchase price inflation, particularly in urban areas. Everybody knows that rental prices have not been moderated.

Another aim was to address a growing affordability gap for many households wishing to purchase their own homes. That has not happened. People cannot get mortgages or save for deposits because they are paying high rents. Another aim was to mature the rental sector so that tenants see it as one that offers security, quality and choice of tenure in the right locations, and providers see it as one they can invest in with certainty. That is not happening. There is no security of tenure. There is no rent freeze, which the Labour Party and others have proposed.

Another aim was to ensure housing's contribution to the economy was steady and supportive of sustainable economic growth. We are not seeing anything like the numbers that were promised in this document. Another aim was to deliver housing in a way that meets current needs while contributing to wider objectives such as the need to support sustainable urban and rural development and communities and to maximise the contribution of the built environment to addressing climate change.

On climate change, there is something in the budget related to housing but it is fairly abysmal. There is €45 million for retrofitting local authority houses, which I think the Minister said in his press conference will provide for 1,000 houses. One thousand local authority houses in my city alone are in need of retrofitting to bring them up to standard. I do not begrudge the midlands its particular scheme but something similar is needed throughout the country. We must bring all local authority houses up to a decent building energy rating, BER, level because, by definition, the people who live in them are in the lower income brackets and it needs to be ensured that they do not suffer from fuel poverty.

I welcome one measure relating to climate change and homes that was announced in the budget, which is the money allocated to the warmer homes scheme. The waiting time for that scheme is between nine months and a year and it is, by definition, for people who own their own homes but have low incomes because they must be on fuel allowance to qualify for it. People on low incomes cannot come up with the matching funds to avail of other grants from the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland, SEAI, to bring their houses up to a decent energy standard and protect themselves from fuel poverty. Those who have the money and are well off can avail of the schemes. That is representative of an ideology that needs to change. There needs to be a focus on poorer families and bringing their homes up to standard because they are the ones who must spend a lot of money on home heating, etc.

The housing budget needs to be dug into in that kind of detail to see how the prevailing attitude is now one where the private sector will deliver. The public sector owns sites. Local authorities may not have the capacity to build themselves but they can hire other people. Why could local authorities not hire builders rather than handing sites over to developers?

Another commitment in the Rebuilding Ireland summary relates to rapid build. A number of companies in Ireland build prefabricated homes and do not require all the construction workers of which we acknowledge we have a shortage. There is no reason that programme seems to have been dropped completely. We could have those homes alongside the traditionally built homes to speed up the delivery of social housing but it is not happening.

This budget has let down the poorest people in our society and bolstered those who can afford to deal with the difficulties that will doubtless arise no matter what kind of Brexit comes to pass. I welcome the large allocation to shore up those who are most at risk from the Brexit, whether that is people living near the Border, businesses that are particularly vulnerable, or sectors such agriculture and food. However, it needs to be ensured that those funds are easily available when businesses suddenly get into trouble. I am thinking of the time, during the economic crash, when the Dell crisis hit Limerick. The then Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Mary Coughlan, ran off to Texas to try and stop the closure but it was too late and it could not be stopped. The closure of the factory felt like a tonne of bricks coming down at that time but there is time to prepare this time around because we know we face Brexit. We must ensure that these welcome supports are available and ready. Businesses need to know how to access those supports if they need them urgently to protect jobs and keep businesses going. For example, we were able to deploy the European Globalisation Adjustment Fund in response to the Dell closure and other Members will be aware of similar closures elsewhere in the country. However, it took a long time to access the funds to help the workers to retrain and find other opportunities.

There is a lot of information, a number of briefings and many different schemes. Some of them are in the form of loans rather than grants. Getting a loan is not always something that a business in trouble can contemplate because it does not know whether it will be able to pay it back. We must focus on accessibility in the context of Brexit.

We needed a bit of imagination and energy and some new thinking in the budget. That is particularly true because we know a certain amount about Brexit and a lot about climate change. We could have seen something fundamental and radical in the budget, for example by ensuring all homes are made warmer and easier to heat and by addressing other issues relating to climate change. There was no radical shift. I read the Minister's speech from last year and it did not differ an awful lot from this year's. We needed something radical and a sense that there are crises coming down the road. The economy is in recovery mode but many people's personal finances have yet to recover. They are struggling and will struggle even more because this budget will not give them anything. That means the amount they can spend on the necessities of life will reduce because of the increases in the cost of living, basic foods, rent, childcare, heating homes and so on.

My party leader described this as a do-nothing budget and we needed it to do something for those who are most vulnerable. It did not do so. It is a timid budget, one that went back into the rabbit hole because the Government is afraid of Brexit and climate change and thought it had better do nothing to scare the horses. We needed the budget to do something to protect the people who are most vulnerable and, unfortunately, it has not.

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