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

I move amendment No. 1:

In page 6, between lines 27 and 28, to insert the following: “and shall be passed by both houses of the Oireachtas before being signed into law”.

Let us be clear that we all want to see genuinely affordable housing being delivered. However, one of the many problems with this Bill is that a whole range of the key issues which would ensure we would finally get some affordable housing are not contained in the Bill itself but are bounced back to the Minister to be done by regulation. Thus, after years and years of promises from successive governments that we are going to get affordable housing through a plan for affordable housing and an affordable housing Bill, we get a Bill in which many of the key issues are bounced back to the Minister to be done by regulation afterwards. We have no idea what will happen with key issues, such as, for example, the critical issues of defining what affordability actually is and whether it will be affordable for ordinary working families. There are also the public private partnerships, PPPs. Yet again the Government is insisting on bringing private property interests into the delivery of so-called affordable housing which has never succeeded but apparently will this time. On a whole range of other absolutely critical issues it will be up to the Minister, after the Bill is passed, to decide these things.

That is not acceptable. We think those things should be in the Bill. We want real definitions of affordability based on people's income. We do not want private investment funds or property developers to be profiteering out of this. We do not want measures, which we will discuss later, which are very likely to reinforce if not worsen the affordability crisis we currently face because they essentially underpin the existing problem of the domination of the housing sector by profit-driven interests which are responsible for the affordability crisis.

These amendments seek to ensure that, at the very minimum, matters relating to these key issues and that are going to be done afterwards must be passed by both Houses of the Oireachtas. This is in order that we have democratic oversight of regulations which may be made afterwards and so that the Minister does not just get carte blancheto do things which may not actually help the situation, or which are, in any event, not transparent or, worse still, as we saw last night, which may actually benefit the wrong people - the investment funds and property developers - rather than the people we should be looking after with a Bill like this, namely, the working people being priced out of the housing sector. That is the logic of this amendment and it is the very least safeguard we should have over a Bill that in many ways is a pig in a poke because we do not know what is going to happen in the future on some of the key issues that will decide whether we get the affordable housing we want.

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