Duncan Smith (Dublin Fingal, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank Sinn Féin for tabling the motion, which the Labour Party will be supporting. In its amendment to the motion, the Government states it will tackle issues facing renters while "ensuring equity and fairness for landlords and tenants", before going on to state that the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage will, at some unidentified point in the future, "bring forward comprehensive new protections for tenants" but that those will be balanced with constitutional property rights.

We have seen how this played out before. We have seen constitutional property rights being used to justify ending the eviction ban and to block almost every Opposition Bill and motion aimed at providing protection for renters. All Members of this House know well that when the Government invokes constitutional property rights, it does so time and time again to justify failing to make the legislative changes that are required to protect renters thoroughly and to give them certainty and much-needed security. The Government will not balance constitutional property rights with protections for tenants. It will continue to privilege constitutional property rights while ignoring the fact the Constitution allows for property rights to be regulated by the principles of social justice and the exigencies of the common good. It is not in the common good to allow renters to live in consistently insecure housing. It is not in the common good to cripple people - young and old - with rents and it is certainly not in the common good to privilege the rights of institutional investors over those of people who need a home.

Last month, the Residential Tenancies Board, RTB, released its rent index for the fourth quarter of 2020. The report set out that in that quarter the national standardised average rent stood at €1,256, a year-on-year growth of 2.7%. In the report, the RTB specifically noted that research indicates that households in the private rental sector suffered a greater economic hit relative to other tenures during the March to June lockdown of 2020 due to those households having a higher concentration of employment in the sectors most severely impacted by the pandemic. Longer restrictions would, therefore, likely have a disproportionate impact on households in the rental sector. Not only are they getting hammered by high, crippling rents and insecure tenancies, they are working in the sectors of the economy that have been impacted to the greatest degree by the pandemic.

Mere weeks after that report was released, the eviction ban, as it was, was gutted and the many private renters were left without protections. Only from next week will you be able to travel outside your county, yet you could be evicted nearly a month before that. You cannot visit family inside their home until 7 June, yet you could be evicted and left without a roof over your own head in April. We understand that hospitality will not be reopening until early June, and then only for outdoor service, and the remainder of the industry not for some time thereafter, yet private renters, who are disproportionately represented in that industry, have been vulnerable to eviction since 23 April. Ultimately, the first industry to open as restrictions relaxed was that of residential landlords.

We are still in a pandemic. We are still required to hold firm and are told we are all in this together, but the latter is not the case and it is becoming increasingly clear it never has been. Renters have been treated terribly during the pandemic, and there is no indication from the policies of this Government that will change any time soon.

The motion calls for the delivery of a significant number of cost rental homes. This is much needed. The Government, in response, stated the legislative basis for its version of cost rental has been set out in the new affordable housing Bill. That is really the issue here. What the Government is selling as cost rental is, in reality, another for-profit model which will fail to provide genuinely affordable housing for people. The supposed cost rental scheme will not be tied to affordability but will be for profit and for investors. Cost rental should not take account of profit for investors. The whole purpose of an affordable rental model is to target lower income renters, protect them and ensure they have a roof over their head in what all Members can agree is a ferocious rental market.

Affordability is the critical issue when it comes to cost rental. If you ask any person outside of this building what he or she understands to be cost rental, the idea that it should not be fundamentally affordable would baffle him or her. The generally agreed definition of affordability equates to one third of a person's net income. The Labour Party put forward an amendment to the affordable housing Bill at the joint committee to define affordability and tie the very concept of affordable rent to income, thereby levelling the playing field somewhat for renters. However, the decision of the Government to vote the amendment down shows it is not interested in real affordability but rather in providing properties at barely less than market cost, with profits remaining the primary goal. Affordable housing as a concept means it is affordable relative to the income of the person or household. Instead, the Minister wants to support a finance-based private sector that cannot adequately meet the housing needs of people in Ireland. That is not legislating in a way that balances rights; it is legislating from the mindset of the developers. It is these very practices and developer-led mindset that led us to the housing bubble more than ten years ago which burst so spectacularly, hurting ordinary, hard-working people to this day.

The Labour Party believes the motion is worthy of our support and we give that support wholeheartedly. We ask the Government to withdraw its amendment and support renters.

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