Dáil debates

Thursday, 24 June 2021

Affordable Housing Bill 2021 [Seanad]: Second Stage (Resumed)

 

4:30 pm

Photo of Éamon Ó CuívÉamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I am sharing time with Deputy Murnane O'Connor.

I am glad to have an opportunity to speak on the Bill. There is a great deal in the Bill, and much of it is praiseworthy. However, I will speak first about the overarching situation. The simple fact is that there are not enough houses available for people seeking houses. That is having two effects. One is that people are homeless because they cannot get accommodation. They are living in hotels, bed and breakfast accommodation and in all sorts of arrangements other than the one they want, which is a permanent home. The second obvious issue that arises is that when something is scarce the price goes up. That is inevitable. Ultimately, we must deal with the supply issue. As long as we are talking about it, but not building houses, we will not solve the housing crisis.

The second issue is that this affects many people in society. Every week people who are homeless contact me. In speaking about people who are homeless, I should point out that there are two types of homelessness. There are those who sleep in doorways, many of whom have social issues and, perhaps, addiction issues. There is also the huge number of the unseen homeless - people living in all types of temporary accommodation for no other reason than that there is no accommodation available or that if they were in a rented property, the owner of the property wanted the property back for one reason or another. We will not solve that problem until we deal with the supply issue and until the State provides social housing.

In the old days we had the rent allowance, which was meant to be a temporary expedient for people who found themselves temporarily without accommodation. It was never meant to be a permanent arrangement. The previous Government, in an effort to reduce the housing lists, by sleight of hand said it would abolish the rent allowance and establish the rental accommodation scheme, RAS, at first and then the housing assistance payment, HAP, in its place. However, that is still renting from a private landlord, and 80% of the people who I represent and who are in the HAP scheme would prefer to be in a local authority or a State-owned house. The reason is security of tenure, which the Irish fought so hard for in the 19th century. It is funny that it has come back to haunt us again. Therefore, we must give people permanent homes, if that is their choice. I am not saying that I have not met people who would prefer to stay in the HAP scheme. That is their choice. It should be a matter of choice, not a matter of being told. Certainly, the vast majority of the people I know would prefer to have local authority housing. The second choice is voluntary housing. I find that most people, given a choice between voluntary housing and local authority housing, prefer the local authority housing because they can aspire to buying it. Many people in Ireland still aspire to have what their parents had, a house they can own.

I always listen very carefully to what Deputy Fitzmaurice has to say about his experience on the ground. I often wish that people who design schemes had his type of experience at the coalface. Certainly, with all the bureaucratic structures and the bidding and tendering processes we have established, we have managed to destroy many small builders who always worked within their capacity and who always took a steady amount of work on hand, collectively, in large and small villages across the country.

They were happy to do the smaller projects and they provided many houses. We must look at our bureaucratic structures to make construction attractive for those small builders again.

The next issue we must examine is that of the delays in getting houses built. There is an inordinate delay from the time a local authority decides to build houses to the time those houses are ready. We lost a great deal of corporate knowledge in local authorities because many of the skilled people were let go. The same skill sets are not to be found in respect of design and other areas in the local authorities as there was previously. I also came across a case in my own constituency where it is going to take well over two years, some two and a half years, to develop a very small housing estate. We must again ask why it takes so long to build standard houses. Only half a mile away from that particular site is a school on which construction started in February 2011, I remember it well, and it opened in September of the same year. A full, standard-sized city school was constructed in that time.

It is funny how everything interconnects. Timber prices have gone crazy. Importing it is one problem, but even the price of native timber has gone up because it is so scarce and there is such a good market for it here and in Britain. Why has that happened? It is because there is a hold-up of licences in Coillte and not because of any shortage in timber. It is amazing, in fact, that the failure of the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, including its appeals board, to deal with licences to fell timber has actually put up the price of timber in this State. I also agree with the point regarding the workforce. If we had planning permission in place tomorrow and we put houses out to tender, we would find that the workforce we had when we were able to build 90,000 houses does not exist any more and nobody has replaced them.

Many of our people in England, Australia and Canada, including skilled machine operators, blocklayers, carpenters and electricians, are now at an age when they would be interested in coming home. We have had this argument before concerning relocation costs and barriers. I refer to people having to sit driver tests again upon returning home and all these sorts of issues which arise. We should look into this matter and see if we should give an inducement to people with certain trades to come home, just as we issue work permits to non-EU citizens in areas where we have critical shortages. Why not induce some of our own to come home to build the houses?

I will address the issue from the perspective of people looking for a house. Local authority houses, if we went back to the previous generation, were inhabited mainly by people who had jobs. Now, people who only have a social welfare income are the only people who can get on the housing list. I have even come across cases where there is no income in a house except for social welfare income. Those are exceptional cases, but they are there. They too were above the income limits for social housing. This situation is creating its own form of social segregation. It is wrong. People working on low incomes should be entitled to get social housing.

Those people also have nowhere to go, because they will not be successful if they go to a bank to get money or go looking for a Rebuilding Ireland loan. It is absolutely farcical that hard-working people on very modest wages are regarded as earning too much to qualify for social housing while also not being able to borrow money. We move up then to those people who a generation ago would have been able to buy a house as a one-income family. They would have what would have been considered steady jobs in the Civil Service, An Garda, nursing and all sorts of areas. Such people cannot now buy houses. It is quite a ridiculous situation. In many cases, when these people apply to a bank, or to the State loan agency which gives money for houses when the banks fail to do so, the replacement for the old county council loans, they find out that the repayments for the highest loan possible would be much less than the current rent being paid by them and everybody else in the same cohort.

Therefore, the people in these cases are not being refused because they are paying exceptional rent. They are paying the going rate. However, it is not possible to borrow an amount on which the repayments would be as big as the rent being paid. One would think the situation would be the other way around. Let us take the case of someone renting a house and paying perhaps €2,000 or €2,500 a month in rent, and it would be higher here in Dublin. We would think that it should be possible for people in that situation to borrow as much money as would give an equivalent repayment capacity and a little bit more in addition, given that there would generally be a feeling that people would stretch themselves a little bit further if they had their own house. We all did that when we got houses. We all stretched our resources that little bit further because our houses became our most precious possession.

I have not even got as far yet as the schemes in the Bill. There is just so much to be done on the subject. I really like the idea of affordable homes, but I have one warning and I have made this view known before to the Minister. I will repeat it. This scheme must not become too legally complex and cumbersome. The only way we will properly test this scheme is by the number of people who wind up living in affordable homes as a result. I have seen in the last decade so many attractive schemes destroyed by red tape. The tenant purchase scheme was destroyed by petty rules. The measure of this scheme, therefore, will be judged according to how many people manage to get an affordable house in the next five years and nothing else. I hope we will watch the small print carefully, because that is the thing which has damned so many initiatives which looked good. I hope we will ensure that this scheme will work as it says on the tin and that the houses really are affordable. However, we must also deal with the loan element, because people will still have to borrow money to buy these houses.

I could go on. As I said at the beginning, however, the problem is simple. If we do not build many more houses at a fair price for punters, we will not solve this problem. In that context, we must deal with the delays in planning and in process. Every process now seems to be slower than it was in the past. Now that we have computers, one would think that everything would actually be faster than it was in the past, but everything seems to be more complex instead. One of the big things we must do is to make things happen faster. One of the biggest hold-ups to making progress on the housing front is a hidden barrier that exists and which was put there by the last Government and by the State. It is called the national planning framework. The reality of the way that is working out on the ground is that it is going to hold up housing in every town and village. It might be very idealistic, but it is not very realistic. Ultimately, those who do not have houses want realism. That is the most important thing they want.

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