Dáil debates

Thursday, 8 July 2021

Affordable Housing Bill 2021 [Seanad]: Committee and Remaining Stages

 

2:30 pm

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

I move amendment No. 5:

In page 7, to delete lines 27 and 28.

As we discussed with the last group of amendments, we are happy to have arrangements with not-for-profit organisations. However, our concerns are not just ideological concerns, as the Minister regularly trots out, but concerns based on experience with what the private investors want out of property and housing and what their objectives do to the housing sector and to prices and rents. There is a need to ensure that in the Affordable Housing Bill, of all places, we do everything we can to make sure that the dynamics of profit seeking do not end up making affordable housing unaffordable or in any other way mess up the objective of delivering that affordable housing. This set of amendments relates to the provisions in the Bill to allow for public private partnerships.

Of course, this is where the danger does lie. To be honest, for anybody to say this is just ideological would be utterly dishonest. I hope the Minister is not going to go on about that now again and say it is just because I am ideological. Public private partnerships, PPPs, have proven consistently to be more expensive and less reliable in the delivery of social housing or affordable housing. This is the reality. Why? It is because the private part of the partnership is in the deal to make money. They do not have the same objectives that we have simply to deliver housing that is affordable. They invest to make money. They do not invest in a project unless they are going to get their pound of flesh and, critically, they often do not continue with a project if at any point in the process they decide they will not make the money they originally thought they were going to make. Furthermore, there is no transparency in PPPs because it is all shrouded in commercial sensitivity. Once there is a PPP, transparency and accountability about the expenditure of public money goes out the window because commercial sensitivity issues kick in. We believe that PPPs have no place in the delivery of affordable housing and these amendments seek to delete those references to PPPs because we want to exclude the failed PPP model from a Bill that is supposed to be about delivering affordable housing.

Let us remember back to the developments on Dominick Street, where we are finally starting to get something. That was because a PPP showed the weaknesses inherent in those public private partnerships. A certain developer just decided at a certain point not to proceed with it and the plans went out the window and we did not get anything. Dominick Street has been left there in disgraceful dereliction for 20 years as a result of this failed model of public private partnership. We are not in favour of repeating it. Of course, I have seen many other examples of this and smaller versions.

I might anticipate certain criticisms that occasionally come from Deputies Mattie McGrath or Michael Collins that this means we have no role for small private contractors. This is not what we are saying in these amendments. I want to stress this. Very often, public housing has been delivered by local authorities stating they want to build, for example, a public housing development of 200 houses and this is contracted out to a private developer. Frankly, I would prefer a State construction company and people directly employed by the local authorities but I understand that short of this often it is about contracting to private local builders. What does not happen in these traditional examples of delivering public housing is that the private builder dictates anything to do with the price of the dwelling or the rents in the dwelling, or that some arrangement is involved whereby huge amounts of public money are paid out for 20, 25 or 30 years, paying over the odds for delivering housing. It is just a straightforward deal where the builders are paid a certain amount and they build the houses. This is different. This is not what we are saying here.

Public private partnerships are a failed model. They are more expensive and less reliable, there is less transparency and they infect the objective of delivering affordable housing with the priority of making profits for private investors. Let us not have more of the stuff we debated last night that once again, when it should be about delivering affordability for people, we have to sneak into the back door the interests that just want to make money. This is what is here. There is no purpose or benefit in it. They cannot deliver finance any cheaper than anybody else. We can do that better than they can. There is simply no justification for public private partnerships in an affordable housing Bill.

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