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

I can certainly see the logic for why a bit of flexibility is needed in rural areas, but I believe that a bit of flexibility is required in urban areas too, depending on the need to deliver, and notwithstanding the critical importance of not reinforcing or underpinning unaffordable prices.

As I said, given a stark choice between a vulture fund buying up houses and a local authority buying them, I would prefer the local authority to buy them rather than us letting vulture funds have them and then having to lease housing from them. I am open to that sort of flexibility if that is what the Minister is saying.

I am very conscious that we are going to hit a guillotine in about ten or 15 minutes and multiple groupings will not be reached. I would like to get a response from the Minister on one issue, given that we will not get to the amendment. There is one group of people who have been very hard done by in terms of not being eligible for social housing having previously been eligible. They are now in a situation where there are no affordable housing schemes. Special provision needs to be made for such people. I urge the Minister to address the eligibility criteria and prioritisation for affordable housing. Many people who have been on lists for ten or 15 years have been heartbroken year after year because when their incomes go slightly over the threshold all of those years are gone and there is no affordable scheme for them. There was a lottery for the Balbriggan project. I see a certain fairness in that. However, people have been knocked off lists. Many of the income thresholds for social housing should be restored and raised because they are too low. If that is not going to happen, the people affected should be given some level of priority in terms of eligibility for affordable schemes, whether that is cost rental or affordable purchase, given that they lost years, in many cases a decade or more, on a housing waiting list only for it all to come to nothing.

We may not get a chance to speak again on the Bill. My next point relates to the open market. I want to acknowledge that the Minister listened to some of the issues we raised, such as changing undue segregation and so on. In some areas, things have been pointed towards people's income and ability to pay, although that should be in the Bill. Our notion of 25% or 30%, as others have proposed, is something that could have been in the Bill.

I take the Minister's point about arbitrary caps and so on. There is a difficulty with them. I do not think setting a proportion of income in order to assure affordability, so that the market does not dictate everything, was something the Minister could not have included in the Bill. The key point is that the market must not dictate the supply, the cost, the price or the rent of affordable housing. People's income and the ability of ordinary working families to pay should be the critical issue in delivering affordable housing.

The Minister has continued to include PPPs and the shared equity scheme in the Bill. People who are not left-wing by any stretch of the imagination, including officials in the Minister's Department, the Central Bank and the ESRI, have said that the shared equity scheme is likely to reinforce unaffordability and drive up the prices of homes.

There are things that are good in this Bill, but these are critical issues. Our group cannot bring ourselves to support a Bill that will include the shared equity scheme or PPPs, much as there are other aspects of it that we would welcome. There is concern that many key areas that need to be in this Bill are not in it, and have instead been pushed back to regulations which we have not seen and do not know about.

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