Gerald Nash (Louth, Labour) | Oireachtas source

At the start of this debate I thought I had stumbled into the Fianna Fáil Ard-Fheis. It was quite an extraordinary defence, with all respect to the Acting Chairman. I am sure he was there and I am sure he enjoyed it. The defence of Housing for All is quite extraordinary and does not tally with the lived experience of the people I and most of us in this House represent. I am talking about the experience they have in their everyday lives and the experience we have of representing people who are on housing lists and who are struggling to obtain their first homes. By any metric Housing for All is failing. It is failing to deliver an adequate supply of affordable housing for the country, it is failing to bring the rental crisis under control and it is failing to tackle the ever-increasing number of people experiencing homelessness. Residential property prices have risen 8% in the last year alone. Prices are now at similar levels to their Celtic tiger peak in 2007. We know to our cost what happened next.

It is incredible the Government would have us believe the strategy that has performed so poorly in bringing about secure and affordable housing is the only viable strategy and the only show in town. Today I am hearing a doubling-down on a failed policy. There is a total lack of ambition on display. How could a Government that claims to be tackling the housing crisis and taking it seriously have a €240 million underspend to be carried over into next year? That underspend means missed targets and fewer people having homes. The Government committed to building 9,000 social and affordable homes this year but we know that target will not be met. Only 325 affordable purchase homes and 350 cost rental homes have been delivered so far. That is simply not good enough. We are to believe 9,100 social and affordable homes will be built next year but Housing for All’s track record to date does not inspire any confidence whatsoever and nor does the Government’s budget for 2023. In real terms, only an additional €38 million has been allocated to capital expenditure for housing. The Government will say that there is an extra €99 million allocated for current expenditure in social housing but that just means long-term leasing of social homes from private landlords and investors. In other words, it is more of the same when we should be investing in building homes.

We in the Labour Party have been calling for several years for the level of social and affordable housing to be brought up to 20,000, with 12,000 social homes to be built by local authorities and 4,000 each of affordable and cost rental homes. We have costed this for everyone to see in our alternative budget proposals published two weeks ago. That is what real ambition to tackle the housing crisis in this country looks like. The Government is not meeting its own targets this year and has provided nowhere near enough resources to achieve what it says it wants to next year.

I refer for a moment to the vacant homes tax. The principle of such a tax is a welcome step towards increasing supply and is indeed one the Labour Party has been calling for for many years now. However, we need to see it for what it is, namely, a short-term solution to a much wider systemic issue. I fear there are so many exemptions that, like the Government’s Housing for All plan, it will not actually achieve what it appears to set out to achieve. It is so badly designed it will not make much of a difference at all.

A serious concern that we would have is the exemption for derelict properties. What is stopping a property owner from allowing their property to fall into dereliction to avoid paying the tax? If we are going to have a vacant homes tax, let us do it properly and let us ensure we have the right balance of carrot and stick. The stick that is being proposed at the moment is completely inadequate.

Nor will we meet the modest Housing for All targets if the Government decides to proceed with the concrete levy as it is currently designed. We are deeply concerned about the introduction of a proposal for an €80 million concrete levy and how it is designed. It is a badly thought-out move that will not only drive house prices up, but will also punish people who want to own their own homes, instead of developers and those responsible in the industry taking on the responsibility wherever possible. We need to review the position on that. We will have a much more extensive debate later this evening in the context of the Sinn Féin motion. The Labour Party called for a 2% levy on construction sector profits, which would raise approximately €50 million a year. That would be a lot more difficult for builders to pass on to those buying or building their own home. It is extremely disappointing that no retrospective tax relief was provided in the budget for those already paying out for repairs to their homes due to construction defects.

Housing for All has also completely failed renters. Rents are and have been out of control for far too long. The new renter's tax credit is tokenistic at best. The Government will claim that it is putting money back into the pockets of renters but in reality it is putting money into the pockets of landlords. They will inevitably raise rents next year and swallow up the small benefit that renters get out of this budget. As it is, the credit is barely enough to cover a week's rent in Dublin, as the Minister of State knows. As long as the Government refuses to freeze rents, as my colleague Deputy Alan Kelly did when he was housing Minister, the new tax credit will mean very little. The Labour Party has been calling for a rent freeze for several years now. Had the Government listened, we might not have found ourselves in the situation we are in now. Instead, the Government has insisted on its market-knows-best approach and slapped Band-Aids on the issue here and there. There have been some positives in cost rental over the last period but the fact is that it is not nearly enough, given the demand. One simple measure that the Labour Party has proposed to increase the delivery of cost rental accommodation is to tie Croí Cónaithe funding to cost rentals. This would mean that where the Government subsidises a developer for the development of apartments, it would be on the condition that these apartments become cost rental. There is a logic to this.

Month on month there are more and more people in emergency accommodation. The latest figures show that 10,805 people, including 3,220 children, are homeless. That does not even go near describing what the real figure is or the real extent of the problem. The vast majority of people experiencing homelessness have come from the private rental sector. Eviction rates are up nearly 60% in the first half of this year. More robust protections for renters are urgently required. The Minister of State will recall that in September of last year, the Labour Party brought forward a Bill that would afford greater protections to renters and freeze rents for three years. The issue has been met with absolute radio silence by the Government since, despite some warm words from the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, on the day. It is manifestly ridiculous that commercial tenants have more rights in the commercial property sector if the property is to be sold. Under our proposed law, those evictions would end. The Government must act now to implement a temporary ban on evictions. It is fair to say that the eviction ban introduced during the pandemic saved a very significant number of people from entering homelessness. Why is the current crisis being treated differently? The record levels of homelessness we are now seeing are this Government's greatest shame and the most glaringly obvious piece of evidence that its Housing for All plan has failed and is failing in real time. Failure to temporarily ban evictions during this cost-of-living crisis can only mean one thing: more and more people in emergency accommodation and sleeping on the streets.

Housing for All's objective was to ensure that every citizen in the State should have access to good-quality homes to purchase or rent at an affordable price, built to a high standard in the right place, offering a high quality of life. By every single one of those metrics it has failed. Measurements do not lie. It is time for the Government to go back to the drawing board and get serious about solving the housing crisis. No more sticking-plaster solutions, unfit-for-purpose schemes or subsidies that merely prop up the profits of developers ultimately. We must put an end to the excessive reliance on the private market to provide an adequate supply of affordable houses to buy or rent. If there is one thing the Housing for All plan has taught us, it is that this excessive reliance is misconceived and irresponsible in the extreme. Housing for All and the reliance on the private market have failed to deliver. The Government has to take a new approach to housing. That approach has to be State-led and must recognise that housing policy should be about providing homes to the people of Ireland, not about providing a new investment opportunity to the already well-off. The supply and affordability crisis can only be solved through long-term, properly resourced State action that delivers affordable and secure housing once and for all.

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