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

I genuinely would like to be able to say I think this Bill will make any difference at all in improving the lot of those who are looking for private rented accommodation, living in such accommodation or facing eviction, or who have been evicted, through no fault of their own, from such accommodation. Tragically, there is really nothing at all in the Bill that will make the slightest bit of difference to the people affected by the absolutely dire crisis we face in private rented accommodation and, more generally, in terms of access to some kind of affordable roof over the heads of the huge numbers of people who need it and are having great difficulty in securing it.

Limiting further increases to 2% or the rate of inflation, whichever is lower, is worse than inadequate. It is worse than useless against a background of rents that already are completely unaffordable. I do not know how many times we have to say this and I cannot believe the Government does not know it. Ministers see the same rent figures we do and I assume they have constituents in the same situation as I do. They must know that if rents in Dublin are €2,000, it means the vast majority of people cannot afford them. In my area, the average rent is €2,200 and rising. This means people need an after-tax income of €26,000 just to pay the rent in my area, or €24,000 in most of Dublin, based on average rents. That equates to 70% of the after-tax income of a worker on the average industrial wage.

How does the Government think this is sustainable and how can it justify allowing for further increases, even if they are capped at 2%? Its response is hopelessly inadequate and does nothing to address the primary reason that people find themselves in housing emergencies or homeless. The vast majority of people who find themselves evicted are in that situation through no fault of their own and not as a result of the expiration of the duration of a Part 4 tenancy. That is not the reason most people find themselves threatened with eviction or made homeless. The vast majority are in that situation because their landlords are allowed to evict them on grounds of sale or substantial refurbishment or because they say they need to move a family member into the home. Those are the reasons this is happening.

I will be impressed with, or even take seriously, the Government's efforts to address the crisis facing tenants or those who want to be tenants but cannot find anywhere affordable, when I stop seeing day in, day out and week in, week out the trail of human misery and suffering that walks into my clinic. People come in week in, week out to tell me the same terrible story about their landlord selling up, to ask me what they are going to do and to say that they simply cannot find somewhere that is affordable.

All of the rents in my area are well in excess of the maximum HAP limits and even the homeless HAP limits. The maximum payment you can get for homeless HAP is €1,900 but, as I said, average rents are about €2,200. You cannot find anything, even with the uplift of homeless HAP. If you find yourself threatened with eviction because your landlord is going to sell, make a substantial refurbishment or move in a relative, you are by definition in a housing emergency, at least in my area and in most of Dublin. You are by definition threatened with the real possibility of homelessness. When people with kids, individuals or families come to my office to express their fears and ask what their options are, I tell them they have to register with the homeless section of Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council. When they go there, the council officials tell them they might be able to get them a hostel somewhere in the city centre. People have a fear of going into shared accommodation, such as hostels in town. They often have kids going to school in our area. They ask how on earth their kids are going to manage in that accommodation. They ask how they will be able to get them to school in the morning.

I will never forget the day a young woman called Kayley came into my office. I could not believe it when she said she had been homeless all her life. I would say she was about 19 or 20 at the time. I brought her case up here a few years ago. When Kayley was born, her mother was homeless and she remained homeless for all the time that Kayley was brought up with her. When Kayley came of age, she tried to become independent - she was at school and she was going to college - but she became homeless. She went from being homeless with her mother to being homeless herself. Never in all her years did she have a secure place to live. Imagine that. While that was a particularly extreme story, I am not exaggerating one iota when I say I see people in dire situations - if not that extreme, not far off it - day in, day out. I see parents with kids who are terrified by the prospect of being made homeless.

This proposal is just not good enough. It is not serious at all. I do not see what the Government thinks it will achieve with this. It will neither touch the crisis that affects my area nor the crisis that affects most of the areas where the rental crisis and the housing and homelessness crisis are most acute. What do we need to do? We saw some of what could be done when it was done in the emergency conditions of the first phase of the pandemic. The Government had to get buy-in from the public in the face of the pandemic and the lockdown measures, so it introduced a freeze on evictions to prevent evictions and it put a complete freeze on further rent increases. Prior to the pandemic, government after government and housing minister after housing minister had said this could not be done. They said they had advice from the Attorney General that it was not possible and was unconstitutional. Lo and behold, faced with a pandemic, it could be done. It was done and it had a positive impact. The result was that the number of families and individuals in homelessness fell. This happened just as those of us who had argued for a freeze on evictions prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, when we were faced with a more general housing crisis, said it would. It is self-evident that the number of people forced into homelessness fell because evictions were no longer possible. The majority of people who are driven into homelessness come from the private rental sector. They are evicted by landlords who sell, substantially refurbish a property or decide to move a relative in. When, for a brief period in the first phase of the pandemic, such grounds for eviction were no longer acceptable, lo and behold the number of people thrown into the misery of homelessness reduced. Similarly, rent increases were frozen so people were not faced with the prospect of rising rents they could not pay.

As I mentioned earlier, the HAP limits are inadequate to cover the cost of the extortionate rents in my area. Insofar as people in the area can get HAP tenancies at all, most of them have to pay top-ups beyond what they would have to pay if they were paying a proper, differential rent in a council house. They simply cannot afford these further top-ups. They often get deeper and deeper into financial trouble because they are paying levels of rent that they simply cannot manage and getting themselves into debt or arrears. Then they find themselves faced with the possibility of eviction if they get into arrears. All of this is sanctioned. It is now official. It used to be unofficial. The council would quietly say, "we know the HAP is not enough so you can top up", but now it is official. The tenant fills out a form to say that he or she needs to top up to pay a rent that he or she cannot afford. Lo and behold, people get into serious trouble. They often get into so much trouble from a financial point of view that they cannot pay the rent and end up threatened with homelessness.

We showed during the pandemic that we can completely freeze any further increases in rent and prevent no-fault evictions, which are currently allowed and are the kinds of evictions that the majority of people find themselves faced with. If we remove those grounds for eviction, fewer people end up in housing emergencies and fewer people end up homeless. Of course, as soon as the Government reintroduced the right to have rent increases and lifted the eviction ban, more and more people started to become homeless and we saw the figures begin to rise. It is as simple as that. All of that is combined, of course, with the continual raising of rents. There has been a 7% national increase over the last year, according to the RTB, on top of the already unaffordable levels. That is the minimum that is required in order to give some security to people in the current situation of utterly unaffordable rents who feel that there is always a possibility around the corner that they could be evicted on the grounds I have mentioned.

That does not go far enough, in my opinion. This is where People Before Profit would go even further than any of the other Opposition parties are suggesting. Given that rent levels are unaffordable, we need to reset rents at affordable levels. That is done in some countries. In Luxembourg, for example, a rent can only be a certain percentage of the capital investment in the property. I am not saying that is the perfect model, but it is a sort of cost rental in the private sector. It limits the amount of profit that the landlord can make, and the amount he or she can charge in rent, based on the investment he or she has made in the property. In other places, rents are set on the basis of particular geographical areas at a level that is considered affordable.

That is what we need to do. If we do not do that, we will not get an affordable rental sector. Even that measure on its own, which we should and must take, will not solve the crisis because, as I am sure the Minster of State will be quick to say, we need supply. We certainly do need supply in the market because there simply is not enough of it but the problem with relying largely on supply from the private sector is that the people who build rental property for profit have absolutely no interest in rents falling. Why on earth would they build properties to rent if they thought the result of building those properties was that rents would fall and their profit margin would reduce? They simply will not do it. They will build properties only if they can make large profits. If there is any suggestion that the profits will decline, they will stop investing. That is the folly of relying on the private sector in order to solve the housing crisis and the rental crisis.

What is necessary, on a far greater scale than this Government or any recent government has been willing to consider, is a return to the direct provision by the State of affordable rental accommodation. In other words, we need council housing, which is genuinely affordable and based on a proportion of people's income. Much as the Government says it is moving back towards this approach, I do not believe it. I think there is a reason we have been asking for four years for a review of the income thresholds for eligibility for social housing. The Government keeps saying there is going to be a review but it never arrives. Why is that? Why is it that the Government has not reviewed upwards the income thresholds for four years? The reason is that the Government is intending to reduce social housing to something that is provided only for people on the lowest of low incomes. That is the plan. There is no question about it. It is convenient for reducing the numbers on the housing lists because as people's incomes creep up each year the Government can lop another few hundred or few thousand off the list.

The issue has now reached such ridiculous proportions that even people in homeless accommodation are being affected. We are dealing with four cases in my area of people who are being evicted from homeless accommodation because of their incomes. They are working and trying to get themselves out of that situation and their work takes their income over the income threshold but they still cannot afford anywhere to live. They are being threatened with homelessness from homeless accommodation. It beggars belief but that is where we have gotten to because of the refusal to raise the income thresholds. That is a deliberate strategy. In responses to parliamentary questions about this, the Minister uses a coded phrase about targeting social housing at the most vulnerable and those most in need. That is code for saying we are only going to make social housing available to people on the lowest incomes from now on, as opposed to historically when social housing was made available to a very broad spectrum of working people. Now, the income thresholds are such that it is available only to the people on the absolute lowest incomes. That is deliberate and the Government's plan is to replace the historic provision of social housing with cost rental accommodation.

Cost rental is better than the open market but it is still not anywhere near as good as social housing, where the rent is a fixed proportion of people's income, which is manageable and adjusts according to their income rising. The rent in cost rental accommodation is linked to the cost of building the house and is therefore more expensive. The first cost rental homes that have been delivered in my area cost €1,200 a month. That is cheaper than the average of €2,200 but still shockingly expensive and completely unaffordable for huge numbers of people who are now no longer eligible for social housing because their income is over the limit. However, they still cannot afford €1,200 a month. I know a council worker who was knocked off the housing list. He is an outdoor worker on low wages and he was knocked off the list because he did semi-permanent overtime on a Saturday, which he could not get out of. That knocked him off the list. He had been on it for ten years. I rang him when the cost rental scheme came up on Enniskerry Road and I said this might work for him. I was thinking in my head that €1,200 did not sound too bad compared to €2,200 but he said I must be joking. He said he could not afford €1,200 on his income, and he asked if I was I kidding him. He explained what his wages were as a council worker. Cost rental is not good enough. We need to set rents at levels that are affordable, based on the income of average and low-paid workers and we need the State to directly provide much of that because the private rented for-profit sector is incapacble of delivering it.

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