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

I move: "That the Bill be now read a Second Time."

I am sharing time with Deputy Paul Murphy. The Title of the Bill should make clear what we are trying to achieve here. For the vast majority of people who are impacted by the current housing crisis, the need for a Bill that will reduce the extortionate, frankly obscene and completely unaffordable rent levels is more than patently obvious, and this Bill attempts to do that. It seeks to bring rents back to levels that will be affordable for ordinary working people because they have reached an utterly unaffordable level. The consequences of that are utterly disastrous for some, with record numbers of families, individuals and children forced into homelessness, overwhelmingly because they simply cannot find anywhere that is affordable within the housing assistance payment, HAP, limits if they are eligible for the HAP, and of course, huge numbers of people who desperately need help meeting the extortionate rents they are being charged are not even eligible. Because they have crept a few euro over the income eligibility threshold, they are not entitled to any support and are expected to pay rents that are off the Richter scale in terms of affordability for the vast majority. I refer not just to low-earning workers but even to people who earn pretty decent wages and salaries.

That is what the Bill is trying to do. It is a matter of absolute urgency that something of this sort be done, and I will now set out the manner in which we will do it. We propose that a national rent authority be set up and that this authority ensure that landlords cannot charge more in rent than 25% of the median household income, whether the national or local median household income, whichever is the lower, given we do not want people in low-income areas to be charged rents based on incomes in high-income areas. The broad principle is that people will not spend more than 25% of their income on putting a roof over their head. We propose that any newly constructed house or apartment, once the Bill has passed, that is going to rented out will immediately be subject to this rent control and the landlord will not be able to charge more than the median household income, as set by the national rent authority. For rental property that already exists and that, almost invariably, costs considerably more than that, the landlord will have one year to bring the rent back to that level, after which all rental property will be subject to that rent control. We make an exemption for luxury properties because, frankly, we do not want to control the rents that are paid by the super-rich, where they might rent luxury penthouses. We have no particular interest in protecting them against those rents or ensuring they will pay rents that would be far lower than their income would allow. We are interested in protecting rents for ordinary people.

The need for this is self-evident. Average national rents are now in excess of €1,500 a month. That means a person needs to earn about €17,000 a year just to pay rent, which is about 45% of the median income. They are the national rents; the picture gets far worse when we look at Dublin, where the average rent is now €2,000, or €24,000 in after-tax income required just to pay rent. More than 50% of the national median household income is what is being asked for. It gets even worse in my area, where in the past six months average rents were €2,600. That is absolutely obscene. This is totally unsustainable and we can see the consequences, with the homelessness figures rising week on week. Of course, the main feature of the surge in homelessness we are seeing at the moment, in almost all the cases I am dealing with, is that it is people who are working who are being made homeless. They are often two working people in one household and still they cannot afford the rents out there.

In many cases, such people are not eligible for social housing support because the Government and previous Governments, for ten years, have refused to raise the income eligibility thresholds in what is clearly a deliberate strategy to make it look as though fewer people are in need of social housing support when, in fact, it is self-evident that more people than ever before need social housing support. The proportion of households that are entitled to social housing support, as the Economic and Social Research Institute, ESRI, recently documented, has dropped dramatically. Whereas 47% of households ten years ago were eligible for social housing support, that figure had fallen to 33% by 2019, and while we do not have figures for what it is now, it is clearly well south of that. The number of people who are getting help is lower than ever before and is being reduced constantly in a stealth cut, whereas the need for that support is greater than ever and we are facing a dire situation for huge numbers of families.

It is equally evident that this is a uniquely disastrous failure of the Government in this country. ICTU, in its recent publication on the social wage, showed that accommodation costs in this country are 78% higher than the EU average.

While rents have gone up by about 13% across Europe over the last decade, here they have gone up by over 70%. In my area, they have gone up by over 100%. This is a unique failure of Irish Governments, way beyond the failure of governments in other countries.

When we raised this issue yesterday with the Taoiseach, he said the legislation would not fly, was "illiterate" and could not be done. Strangely enough, they do it elsewhere in Europe. Is it not very odd that they have succeeded elsewhere in preventing this kind of dire housing crisis and these extortionate, obscene increases in rent levels? It is not that rents have not gone up in Europe, but they have not gone up to anything like the levels they have reached here. That is because other countries have rent controls. In France, they have recently introduced further rent controls whereby if they see rent reaching levels beyond what is affordable for ordinary people, they cap them with maximum rents. In the Netherlands, where rents are too high there is a legal power to reclassify housing as social housing and charge social housing rents. Germany has a rent control regime in place whereby if rents in particular areas are way out of sync with other parts of the country, they can be controlled, capped and brought back down to reasonable levels. The United States has multiple forms of rent controls. The idea this cannot be done is not true. Are we open to amendments that would tweak how we do this? Of course we are, but we want to establish the urgent need and viability of introducing a regime that ensures people can afford the rents being charged. It is done elsewhere and can be done here.

The reason the Government does not want to do it is the same reason we have a housing crisis in the first place. It is because its housing and rental policy is being dictated by propertied interests, including developers, speculators and investors, rather than by the needs of our people for secure, affordable rental accommodation.

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