Darragh O'Brien (Dublin Fingal, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

In my response to the budget announced yesterday I will focus specifically on the housing brief which I hold. I listened with interest to the five or six-minute contribution made by the Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government, Deputy Eoghan Murphy. I was struck by the famous phrase: "If you're explaining, you're losing." The reality is that we have the lowest homeownership rates in Ireland for more than 50 years. We have the highest homelessness rates in Ireland for more than 50 years. We have the highest rents ever in Ireland. The average rent in Dublin city is €2,024 per month. We also have the longest housing waiting lists we have ever had. That is the context in which the budget was framed.

The overall Vote of €2.6 billion is significant in the context of the additional capital funding provided for public and social housing, but the big issue has been implementation. The difficulty has been the delivery of houses faster to meet the existing need. In the budget announced last year my party and I negotiated lifting the discretionary cap for social housing to €6 million to enable the local authorities to build homes quicker. It would mean effectively that in Cork, Galway, Donegal, Dublin and Meath the local authorities would be able to put the provision of housing estates out to tender up to the value of €6 million. That effectively would mean housing estates of 40 to 50 homes. Instead, the cap remained at €2 million, which meant everything above that figure went through a 14-month process with the Custom House which delayed delivery. It was something we agreed last year, but the Minister, Deputy Eoghan Murphy, and the Fine Gael-led Government reneged on it. They acted in bad faith and did not implement the measure. We again sought such a measure this year and it has again been agreed that local authorities will have the autonomy to build medium-sized housing estates, which they are well able to do. They will be subject to audit by the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government. That will speed up the delivery of social homes across the country.

It may take a change of Government to implement the change in policy. That is something I earnestly hope will happen in the coming months. This is a Brexit budget and the two Ministers present, Deputies Creed and McEntee, know that the only reason we are having this budget is Brexit. It is not a normal budget. Others on the far left and in Sinn Féin have tried to frame other things around the budget, but the reality is that it is to provide stability for the country while we enter into a crucial stage of negotiations with the European Union and the United Kingdom to try to ensure we will protect the country as best we can against the effects of a no-deal Brexit. We have put the national interest first in that regard in working as a collective to try to ensure jobs, the economy and people's livelihoods dependent on the trading relationship between Ireland and Britain and the seamless nature of our membership of the European Union will be protected in the coming months. That is why we have facilitated and will continue to facilitate the passage of the budget through the Finance Bill and the Social Welfare Bill. We have been upfront and honest with people in that regard.

In the few short months the Government has, I wish to see implementation of some of the decisions that have been taken. I want to see the establishment of an affordable purchase scheme for first-time buyers. We negotiated a figure of €310 million last year. The four Dublin local authorities have adopted the scheme which is in place, but we need to get on with setting the criteria to give people hope they will be able to purchase their own home. My party believes in homeownership, unlike others. There are parties represented in this House which do not believe in homeownership, which want a State-run housing system. Public housing is part of the solution and something I support, but my party and I also support homeownership. It is an honest and just aspiration for people to aspire to owning their own home. Homeownership also provides the best security of tenure. We want to see the establishment of the scheme and have it progressed with the criteria set down.

A pilot scheme was announced for the affordable rental scheme in 2015, bit we have only broken ground now. That is one example, if another is needed, of how delayed a response has been in implementation on the ground of Government announcements. On the delivery of homes through approved housing bodies, AHBs, the Government has still not grappled with the fact that approved housing bodies remain on-balance sheet. While that will not be a problem this year, as more funding is invested through AHBs, it will affect the delivery of homes. The Government must redouble its efforts and make good the commitment it made to work with the AHBs to get them off-balance sheet. It has not been doing this; rather, it has been paying lip service to it.

In his brief remarks this evening the Minister, Deputy Eoghan Murphy, also alluded to the LDA and the fact that €17 million had been allocated to it. I remind colleagues that the LDA was announced in March or April 2018, but we still only have the heads of the Bill, rather than legislation. They were brought to the Joint Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government last week. No land has been transferred to the LDA because it has not been set up on a statutory basis. It has been set up by ministerial order, but there is no primary legislation underpinning the funding provided and the Bill was only brought before the relevant committee last week. That is another example of a big announcement and a lack of delivery.

I assume the Minister's officials are listening to the debate. I refer to the pyrite remediation scheme and mica, an issue which many Members, including my colleague, Deputy McConalogue, have raised. I am pleased that mica has been brought into the pyrite remediation scheme, but I am concerned about the level of funding that has been allocated up to next year. As both schemes move forward, we will have to consider the provision of additional funding, particularly when we start to tackle mica in counties Donegal and Sligo. I again record my support for the expansion of the pyrite remediation scheme to cover homes where the damage rating does not reach category 2 and people cannot have their houses remediated. They are stuck in limbo. The Minister of State, Deputy McEntee, is also aware of some of the people affected in that regard. They cannot move on because they cannot obtain a green certificate. There is still an issue in that regard. It is welcome that the pyrite remediation scheme is still in place and that mica will be added to it. We must try to assist the hundreds of families across the country whose houses need detailed remediation and who need to be given a fresh start.

The Minister, Deputy Eoghan Murphy, mentioned that there would be an allocation of an additional €135 million next year to meet the obligations the State had under the housing assistance payment, HAP, scheme. He has repeated that no one has come up with another solution or a viable alternative to the HAP scheme, which is true, but the HAP scheme is very expensive and a short-term fix. The long-term solution is to build proper homes for those families who are living on a day-to-day basis with 12-month leases in the private rented sector. A total of 21% are now living in private rented accommodation, the vast bulk of whom have short-term, 12-month renewable leases. The over-reliance in Rebuilding Ireland on housing families through the HAP scheme must be tackled. More than two thirds of all those deemed to have been housed last year under Rebuilding Ireland were facilitated through the HAP scheme, which should be a short-term fix, not a long-term solution.

We must build more social homes through measures proposed by Fianna Fáil such as the lifting of the discretionary cap, the establishment of the affordable housing purchase scheme and an affordable rent scheme which was previously agreed to. It is welcome that the Minister has at long last come around to our view that the help-to-buy grant should be retained for the next two years. We fought tooth and nail to ensure it would remain because it gave some hope to people who wanted to buy. It provided some assistance towards providing a deposit to help people to get onto the housing ladder. In the absence of an affordable purchase scheme being up and running and open for applications, the help-to-buy grant needed to be maintained. I accept that it is expensive, but it is direct assistance for more than 15,000 people whom it has helped to get a foot onto the property ladder to buy their own home and put down roots in secure housing for families.

That is what we in Fianna Fáil see as the way forward.

During these budget debates I found it interesting that, for once, Sinn Féin in particular stated that it did not support the help-to-buy grants. Neither it nor the far left ever supported it. This again shows me clearly that those parties do not support the notion of homeownership. People who want to get on and set down their own roots with their own home should be assisted, particularly first-time buyers.

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