Joan Collins (Dublin South Central, Independents 4 Change) | Oireachtas source

I thank People Before Profit for introducing the Rent Reduction Bill, which I support. I think many will consider the proposal in the Bill to reduce rents in the private rental sector revolutionary, but a revolutionary approach, a practical and realistic proposal on behalf of renters, is what is required. The right to a secure, affordable place to live, a home, is an essential human right that has been denied to an increasingly large proportion of the population. We have a housing crisis, and none of the measures taken by this Government and previous Governments have come close to tackling the problem. I remember the then Minister with responsible for housing, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Deputy Coveney, stating in 2016 and 2017 that there would be no homeless families in hotels and bed and breakfasts by July 2017, and we still have a crisis.

A key factor in the crisis is the unaffordable rents demanded in the private rental sector. Rents have risen by 100% in the past ten years. There is certainly no evidence of a 100% rise in the cost to landlords of maintaining a property or of a 100% increase in workers' wages over that period. We now have a year-on-year inflation rate of 10%, but there was nothing like that in the past ten years. Building costs have risen, particularly for apartments, with the cost of buying a new apartment now ten times the average wage of €47,000 a year. The only people who can afford to buy or build are major international investment funds as long-term investments. When people cannot afford to buy, they are forced to rent in a market dominated increasingly by such big investment funds. I got an email just yesterday from a renter in Lansdowne Gate. IRES REIT has notified him that a further 2% rent increase will come into effect from 1 October 2022. That follows a 4% increase last year. He feels the residents are being manipulated by the vulture funds in the interests of their shareholders.

In 2021, two-bedroom apartments in Dublin were being advertised at €2,250 a month. Even for somebody earning €50,000 a year, which is above the average wage, that equates to 70% of their take-home pay. For the majority of working people who earn below the average wage, this is an intolerable situation. Even with an effective rent freeze, which we do not have, rents will remain unaffordable. For example, for someone earning €30,000, a rent set at 25% of take-home pay would be approximately €480 a month; for someone earning €40,000, it would be approximately €625 a month. Those are affordable rents. At a minimum, therefore, rents in the private sector need to come down by 50% to be affordable. There would be a hue and cry from the usual suspects that that would force the individual or so-called accidental landlords out of the system, but that is already happening, mainly to cash in on extremely high property prices. The Government should fund local authorities and approved housing bodies, AHBs, to buy those properties and let them back to tenants at affordable rents and with security of tenure.

The problem of supply will be met only by a State-led programme to build on already zoned public land 100,000 public housing units in a mix of traditional council housing and cost-rental housing. That should have been initiated years ago. If it has been, we would not be in the situation we are in now. We need a sea change in our approach to solving this crisis. It is an emergency. If that means a revolution in thinking and approach, that is what is required.

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