Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

That brings me to the Bill. Let me very clear that, contrary to the claim of Deputy Cassells, I, and Sinn Féin, support tenure neutrality. We believe that a housing system should allow people to freely choose whether they want to own or rent a home and should allow them to make that choice not out of fear of rising rents, insecure tenure or affordability after pension age, but because their choice best suits their interests. That means making both renting and owner-occupation affordable and secure. The big concern I have with this Bill is that it does nothing to address these key issues. While it would allow a local authority to prescribe a portion of a development for first-time buyers, it does nothing to ensure that these properties are affordable. It could also have the unintended consequence of pushing up the cost of rents in the remaining 70% of any development, as the developer seeks to recoup revenue lost in the sale of a proportion of the properties to first-time buyers. That could result in increased rents for the renters in the remainder of a development.

I agree fully with the Minister's concerns over the impact of this legislation on Part V of the Planning and Development Act 2000 and, particularly, the exclusion of Part V from build-to-rent developments. I hear what Deputy O'Brien has said, but it is not dealt with in the Bill with sufficient clarity and that is a concern that the Minister and many others share with all sincerity.

The real issue facing us today is how to ensure a substantial supply of affordable homes to rent and buy for those not eligible for social housing. This is where our primary focus should be. This means dramatically increasing investment by the Government in public housing on public land to meet social and affordable housing need. Sinn Féin will support the legislation this evening as we agree with its intention but it has a long way to go and requires much amending before it actually offers first-time buyers what they really need, namely, access to good quality, secure and affordable homes.

I also wish to respond briefly to some of the Minister's claims about affordable housing. One of the real concerns that many of us have with the initiatives that the Minister listed is that the homes to rent or buy that he is talking about will not be affordable to the households which so desperately need them. For example, we are currently looking at the first affordable cost rental scheme in Enniskerry Road in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown coming in with rents of €1,200 per month. For those households whose incomes are above the threshold for social housing eligibility, €1,200 a month is not affordable. It is significantly above 30% of their take-home pay. We need these schemes to deliver rents between €700 and €900 a month to particularly target those households in the income categories between €35,000 and €55,000.

Likewise, with the purchase homes, one of the aspects many of us cannot understand about the final proposal that has come back from Dublin City Council on O'Devaney Gardens is that whereas in Poppintree, in Ballymun, Ó Cualann, using an equivalent of the serviced sites fund and land from Dublin City Council, was able to sell good-quality, affordable homes to working families priced between €180,000 and €225,000, the purchase price of the majority of the homes in O'Devaney Gardens would be €310,000. However, there also will be a €50,000 clawback whereby if the affordable purchaser, as they are called, ever sells the house or passes it on to family, he or she will ultimately pay upwards of €360,000. That is not affordable for working families on €45,000, €55,000 or €65,000.

The same is true with the Local Infrastructure Housing Activation Fund, LIHAF. If the Minister looks at his Department's spreadsheet that was published last year he will see that in the majority of cases where private developers have secured funding from the Local Infrastructure Housing Activation Fund, often to the tune of €10 million to €20 million, the properties they will then sell have no affordability discount of any meaningful kind. In some developments they will come in at or above market prices at the time the funding was agreed. In some cases, this fund was made available to some of the largest and most cash-wealthy developers who did not even need it.

It is all very well for the Minister to come into the House and tell us he has a serviced site fund, an infrastructure activation fund and the Rebuilding Ireland home loan but, increasingly, we are finding in our constituencies large numbers of modest income working families who cannot access homes. When those homes about which the Minister is talking become available, they will still not be able to access genuinely affordable homes to rent or buy, which is the reason he must seriously revisit both his understanding of, his price range and his investment strategies in respect of affordable housing because unless we start to deliver thousands of genuinely affordable homes to rent or buy, preferably by building public homes on public lands, the affordability crisis will get worse, contrary to the claims the Minister made here today.

Sinn Féin will support the Bill but we believe it needs a great deal of work. We are happy to work with other Deputies in the committee to try to meet that end.

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