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

I thank all the Deputies who spoke in support of the Bill. It is five years since I introduced a Bill to constrain rents in the private rental sector in this House. At that time, the Minister of State's party supported the Bill to link rents to inflation. All of the arguments that I have heard tonight are Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael arguments, even when they are made by Green Party Deputies, and they are the same arguments that were used five years ago not to take the kind of action that I proposed then. Since Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael refused to listen to the Opposition not just five years ago but on the other four occasions when rent certainty was voted down, renters are in a much worse position today than they were then. What I am hearing tonight is, just as Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael refused to listen to the Opposition then, to the great detriment of renters, that history is now repeating itself.

The one argument that nobody on the Government side has explained is why they think that any rent increase is acceptable over the next period. Linking rents to inflation is better than 4% if inflation stays below 4% but inflation is currently running at 1.9% and rising. What happens if it rises to 3% or 4%? Are we really saying that renters paying an average rent of €1,750 in Dublin or €1,350 outside Dublin can bear any level of rent increase? Are we seriously saying that new entrants to the Dublin market, who are paying between €2,000 and €3,000 a month, can bear any level of rent increase in the current year? The answer to that question is a categorical "No", which is why the correct policy at this point in time is an emergency three-year ban on rent increases in the private rental sector.

The Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, said that a ban will not increase supply. He is right but nobody on this side of the Chamber claimed that it would. It is simply to stop rents from rising any further. What would increase supply would be if Government invested hundreds of millions of euro in thousands of affordable cost rental accommodation units annually, which every agency advising Government has recommended for years. We have not seen that to date. I await the Minister's housing plan and budget 2022 with great interest but on the basis of the record of both this Government in its first year and its predecessor, that level of investment and the volumes of supply of cost rental accommodation that we want to see are unlikely to be forthcoming.

The Minister also said that we have to be mindful of the impact on landlords. This is one of the arguments that I just do not understand. What this Bill proposes is incredibly modest. It states that landlords can continue to charge the rents that are currently locked into our market. It is significantly above the peak of the Celtic tiger. Any new investment into the market is at an exceptionally high level of return, so I do not see how a three-year temporary ban would have any negative impact on levels of investment. The Minister is right that, for three years, I have urged both the last Government and this Government to undertake an urgent review of the chronic loss of accidental and semi-professional landlord properties from the market. Neither Government was willing to do that. We have a problem but insisting that renters have to pay increasingly extortionate levels of rents is not the solution. The Government should do what I have advised it to do for three years and ask the Residential Tenancies Board and the ESRI to conduct a study of why those landlords are leaving and what can be done to slow down that disorderly exit. The idea that the solution lies in the pockets of renters is not acceptable.

The argument about protecting property rights is absolutely bogus. If we can stop rent increases for two years, as was done in 2014 and 2015 and during the pandemic, we can absolutely stop rent increases now. There is significant legal opinion in the public domain to give effect to that.

I will make the arguments that I made at the start again. We have to ban rent increases for three years. Renters simply cannot take any more. We also have to reduce rents and the quickest and legally simplest way to do that is a refundable tax credit to put a month's rent back in every renter's pocket for that emergency period of three years. We need hundreds of million of euro of Exchequer expenditure, from Government borrowing, to be invested in the delivery of at least 4,000 affordable cost rental units every year until we have built that stock. We also need to see action on standards and NCT-style certification for minimum standards should be introduced as a matter of urgency. We also need tenancies of indefinite duration. I know the Government has said it will do it but I understand that what it will introduce does not include tenancies of indefinite duration. We will judge that when it comes.

The bottom line is that once again, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and, regrettably, the Green Party, are walking away from renters. They are siding with the institutional interests of the private rental market. The people who will suffer will be the hard-pressed renters. It is a shame that anybody thinks that the Government's deferral of the reading of Second Stage for 12 months is anything other than a cynical ploy to avoid the blushes of having to vote against such an urgent and eminently sensible measure. On that basis, I commend the Bill to the House.

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