Denis Naughten (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am sharing time with Deputy Tóibín. Home buyers should not have to compete with investment funds. While the measure before us is a starting point in tackling this issue, it is no more than that. I fear that the 10% stamp duty provision does not go far enough. It was pointed out earlier today that share prices in the largest REIT in Ireland went up 4% this morning on foot of the Government announcement. That has to give rise to genuine concern for all of us in the House. I want a commitment from the Minister that this measure will be reviewed and revisited within the next 20 weeks.

In the meantime, we need to look to other jurisdictions to see what works and does not work. We need to look at the incentives that are in place and go through them thoroughly. At present, we are providing tax incentives to encourage investment from these particular funds. In fact, there is a double incentive provided. A total of €223 million in HAP payments is going into these investment funds, with a guaranteed return of a 4% increase in rents per annum. That is in addition to the tax incentives and structures that are in place. Availing of the HAP payments means the funds do not have to source the tenants or deal with vacancies or maintenance, and the properties are handed back to them at the end of a ten-year, 15-year or 25-year lease to the local authority. For the investors, there is a high-income, low-risk return and a tax incentive. The existence of this direct double benefit needs to be revisited.

At the same time, we are not seeing a reduction in the price of rental accommodation in Dublin city.

If you look at daft.ieor myhome.ietoday, you will see that a one-bedroom apartment in the Dublin suburbs costs a minimum of €2,000 a month and that a two-bedroom apartment costs €2,500. These are not affordable rents, and that really needs to be addressed.

What I find frustrating - and I have taken up this point with the Minister previously - is the fact that we provide security of tenure for cows in fields but not for children in rented homes. Up to the 2000s, we had a model of leasing farmland which was based on an 11-month lease and farmers could not plan for a future beyond that. The Government of the day took a decision to bring in a tax allowance to incentivise farmers to lease their lands long-term for a minimum of five years. Additional incentives were subsequently introduced to allow for ten- and even 15-year leases. As a result, more than half of the land in this country that is leased out is leased out long-term and this provides security to the farmer actively farming the land. While we are prepared to put those structures in place for farmers for the management of cattle and farmland, we have failed to do anything for security of tenure on a long-term basis for people in rental accommodation in respect of the amount of rent they pay or the terms of their leases. As a minimum condition of the incentives in place for the organisations that are buying up apartment blocks across the country, they should guarantee fixed rents and security of tenure for their tenants over the term of those incentives. This would encourage the development of a long-term leasing approach in this country, which is far more sensible and more along the lines of the European model and would at least provide some security for families who cannot afford to source houses of their own. One of the biggest problems we have in this country with families finding themselves homeless is the fact of the churning of accommodation, whereby the lease on the rental accommodation ends up lapsing and then the families end up trying to find alternative accommodation. Such a model would help to address that.

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