Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

Housing for All is a good name for a policy document; I will give the Government that. I believe the name is borrowed from the housing movement. It obviously bears no relationship to the actual content of the policy and the actual strategy of the Government. It would more accurately be named something like "Profit for a Minority", "Profits for the Few" or "Profits for Developers".

The core of the so-called Housing for All plan is simply a continuation of the same failed reliance on incentivising the private sector to deliver housing. Effectively the Government's model is trickle-down housing. It takes some level of gumption by the Government to claim it will deliver 300,000 homes by 2030. That is the blaring headline it wants. While I am used to a lot from this Government, I found it astounding that the majority of those homes are simply the Government estimating what the private sector will deliver. That is it. The Government does not have any hand or part in it; it is simply saying the private sector will deliver that. If the private sector delivers it, the Government can claim that is great, but if the private sector does not deliver it, the Government washes its hands of it and will have no responsibility for it. It is the same model of incentivising private developers to build and hoping some of that trickles down to ordinary people.

I will focus on a few points. Due to the pressure from below, there are relatively significant increases in the amount of social housing that is promised of something like 10,000 a year. However, the emerging details indicate the Government is including housing built under the provisions of Part V. These are not separate builds driven by local authorities. The Government is relying on the private market and then hoping it gets 10% or 20% of those. They are not all new builds and also include refurbishments. As we know - we debated it last week - the Government bowed to the lobbying of the private developers in accepting that many of them would be exempt for a long time into the future.

The other point is that literally a week or so after the publication of Housing for All, the same Government policy continued, with the privatisation of public land in South Dublin County Council. Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, the Green Party and the Social Democrats all voted to sell off public land to a private developer. Unfortunately, Sinn Féin did not vote against; it abstained. Strikingly the land was not given to the LDA. The Government has gone on and on about how it would give the land to the LDA. In this case it was given to a private developer. Some of the land will be used to build houses at market price. The majority of the land will be used for so-called affordable housing, which in reality is just at a discount to the market rate and will be unaffordable.

I want to focus on the most glaring omission. There is almost nothing for renters in Housing for All. Rents in Ireland are at the highest on record and Dublin has among the highest rents in the world. More than 500,000 households are trapped in the private rented sector, their lives blighted by housing insecurity and unaffordability. Those renters are commonly paying 30%, 40%, 50% or more of their income on rent. They have little if anything left over after rent to pay for the essentials. We are facing into a crisis with fuel prices and yet they will need to continue to pay these levels of rent.

Almost 500,000 young people are trapped living with their parents because they cannot afford to rent a place of their own. How does Housing for All respond to this unprecedented crisis of affordability? It states that the Government will extend rent pressure zones to 2024 and will link rents to the harmonised index of consumer prices. We have some of the highest rental costs in the world and the Government's big great idea is to ensure that rent increases with inflation. This is just when inflation is taking off. Inflation reached 3% last month and looks set to go higher. The Government has had the neck to refer to this as a rent value freeze.

Last week, the Tánaiste commented that we needed to balance that one person's rent is another person's income.

Will somebody please think of the corporate landlords and their need of an income? It is balanced all right. It is balanced at a level that index links the enrichment of landlords, many of them in this Chamber, and impoverishes renters. Once again landlords will be toasting their peers in government. Instead we need rent controls and reductions and rents should be linked to income with nobody forced to pay one third or more of their income on rent. People Before Profit is campaigning for real rent controls to bring rents down to affordable levels and we are arguing for the establishment of a rental board with responsibility to maintain minimum accommodation standards, secure tenancy leases and reduce existing rents to below 2011 levels.

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