Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

People Before Profit will support the Labour Party Bill. We welcome it. Indeed, it has some similarities to the Thirty-ninth Amendment of the Constitution (Right to Housing) Bill 2020 that People Before Profit recently introduced in the House and which, fortunately, passed to Second Stage, in that it seeks to delimit the rights of private property relative to the social and common good of ensuring that people have a right to secure and affordable housing.

Insofar as the Bill seeks to empower local authorities to compulsorily purchase land suitable for housing and ensure that landowners and property developers hoarding land do not benefit as they have done, obscenely, from the ownership of land that is rezoned or serviced, then it is a good measure. It will help control land prices which have contributed significantly to the current housing crisis, particularly the extraordinary unaffordability of the housing that has been built, and curtail the shocking and obscene profits made by land hoarders and speculators.

The Bill will also deal with one of the key issues that contributed to corruption in this country around the rezoning process.

For all those reasons, People Before Profit will support the Bill. The Government's deferral of this Bill is a disgrace and its justifications threadbare, but as usual it is dancing to the tune of the private market, developers, investment funds and speculators.

For that reason, the Labour Party's criticisms today of successive Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael Governments, members of which did not want to implement the Kenny report and have danced to the tune of the developers and speculators who caused this housing crisis, is absolutely just and valid. As others have said, however, Labour Party members need to stick up their hands and acknowledge that when they were in office they did not bring forward this Bill and, indeed, moved in exactly the opposite direction. Empowering local authorities by giving them the right to compulsorily purchase land being hoarded for housing and creating the legal framework for it is absolutely useless if, when the Labour Party was in government, land in public hands was simultaneously unloaded, on a scale unprecedented in the history of the State, into the hands of the very investment funds and speculators who created the crisis. Of course, that is what happened during the 2011 to 2016 Fine Gael-Labour Party Government, which included housing Ministers, largely, from the Labour Party and a Labour Party Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform. I vividly remember appealing, as other Deputies did in the House, to the Labour Party about the folly of unloading what turned out to be €40 billion worth of land assets that were finally in the State's hands back into the hands of the vulture funds, speculators and property developers who had wrecked the economy.

We need to think about this because it speaks to other matters that need to be addressed in the Bill. I am not just saying that to score points. That land and property is now probably worth double what it was. We know vast profits have been made from it and that half of these strategic housing developments, SHDs, are probably on land unloaded by the National Asset Management Agency, NAMA, under a Fine Gael-Labour Party Government into the hands of these people, who are sitting on it. This Bill will not even deal with that planning permission issue. The value of that €40 billion worth of land that was in public hands was given to these people. They then received planning permission under the SHDs that doubled its value and they are now sitting on the land. This Bill will not even deal with that, much as we support it. We need to unravel the damage done in that period. We need mechanisms to take that land and property back from those people. We need to explore every avenue to get at the windfall profits they made because they were not taxed properly in order to recover the damage that was done and led to the current housing and homelessness crisis.

We absolutely support this Bill but we have to acknowledge the damage done because we must undo it. We have to call out NAMA part 2, in the form of the Land Development Agency, LDA, which, after NAMA, will turn out to be the next biggest heist of public land that could be used for public and affordable housing to address the housing crisis. Instead, just like the NAMA disaster, some of the public land bank will be unloaded into the hands of private financiers and investment funds, leading inexorably to the same disastrous consequences we had in the past.

I have to use this opportunity to give an example of how much further we have to go to undo this damage. I have repeatedly raised the case of the St. Helen's Court development in my area. Of course, no Minister is even here. I apologise, a Minister of State is in the Chamber. There are many aspects to the St. Helen's Court development, an apartment complex in which working people have lived, in many cases for 20, 15 or five years, which is owned by vulture funds. These funds are sitting on this development, have managed to drive out about three quarters of the tenants, people who have done nothing wrong, and are trying to evict the rest of them. As part of the plan to drive up the value of that property, ten of those apartments have been sitting empty for two and a half years. These are perfectly good refurbished apartments, which the funds are just sitting on. That is just one case but it is happening all over the city. What will we do about it? What is in this Bill, as good as it is, does not undo that damage.

We need a proactive policy so that any developer, investment fund or landlord sitting on empty property in order to drive up its value and evict its tenants has to be stopped and the property taken from them. They should not gain a red cent. They should not get 125% on it; in fact, it should not even be 100%. The maximum they should get is the cost at which the property was acquired, nothing more. There should be no allowance for them to make profit out of planning permission, sitting on land or property or speculating. Indeed, they should not be allowed to evict people who have done absolutely nothing wrong, as they are trying to do in St. Helen's Court and in many other places. The figures that came out this week on the number of evictions taking place show that huge numbers of tenants who have done absolutely nothing wrong will be made homeless because these people are allowed get away with it.

We support the Bill and absolutely condemn the Government's decision to defer it. However, we have to go much further to undo the disastrous damage done as a result of NAMA, which the Government wants to repeat with the LDA by privatising land that was, or is, in public ownership.

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