Gerald Nash (Louth, Labour) | Oireachtas source

The facts are clear. One year on from the publication of Housing for All, the Government's signature plan is failing and failing abjectly. The Minister of State might think that as an Opposition Member that I would take some pleasure in reminding the Government of that, but I do not, because we need a plan that works. We need a housing plan for all but this is not it. I take no pleasure in saying that because housing is the single biggest social and, arguably, economic issue facing this country. It is the number one issue based on the contacts from my constituents to my office, at my clinics or when I speak to those I represent on the streets of Louth and east Meath. The way we as a State approach the basic fundamental question of housing has changed dramatically in the past 25 years. When I first became a public representative, which I think was around the same time as the Minister of State, local authorities were more or less building a sufficient number of homes to meet demand. That is not to say that there not problems. There certainly were at back in the 1990s. At that time it meant that we, as elected representatives, worked with housing officers in local authorities to make the case for our constituents who were eligible for social housing to have them housed in a timely period. More often than not, those reasonable expectations were met. The local authority provided them with the support they needed and the State provided the local authorities with the support they needed, by and large.

We had some agency, as public representatives, to advocate with and on behalf of our constituents, but now, with the dreadfully low level of social and affordable homes available, constituents of mine have been reduced to coming into my office or stopping me on the street and asking, for example, for references for private landlords for properties they will probably never be able to rent. They feel they have no agency. They have been on a housing list for up to 12 years. I feel, as a public representative of 23 years' standing, that I have no agency with the local authority. We are having meetings with housing officers in local authorities and making cases to them for properties that simply do not exist and they are not going to exist this time next year and they are not going to exist in two years' time either. This is becoming increasingly difficult.

All this changed in the early- or mid-2000s with the financialisaton of our housing model. Despite what the spin attached to Housing for All claims, the reality is that not much will change during this Administration's time in office. There is an over-reliance on private developers to address the housing crisis and piecemeal tax breaks for landlords and renters that fail to understand the extent and depth and nature of the problem, while all the time maintaining the destructive speculative model that is undermining the fabric of our society and our economy. We do not have a functioning housing system. A working system would not see more than 11,000 people homeless, and that is an underestimation of the real figures. A system that works would not see hundreds of people queuing around corners, waiting to view properties they will never be able to rent and certainly never be able to buy. Yes, we need an eviction ban, a three-year rent freeze and to adjust HAP limits throughout the State. Yes, we need to build more private homes in sustainable communities and get our act together to deal finally and fundamentally with dereliction and vacancy to bring homes back into use. Yes, we need to ensure income limits for public housing are increased to €40,000, and we fundamentally need to tackle hoarding of land that is ripe and ready for housing developments with the kind of penal taxes and disincentives we see applied right across western European economies. The systemic solution is staring us all in the face: the need to build more social and affordable homes - end of story. We also need to identify and acknowledge the fact our broken system has an extreme over-reliance on State subsidies for private rental accommodation to provide social housing through current expenditure programmes like HAP, the rental accommodation scheme, RAS, and social leasing. What started out as short-term schemes, in some cases specialised support schemes, have now become a deeply embedded feature of our social housing system.

Our ultimate goal should be to phase out those kinds of systems and ensure systems such as HAP and RAS are only used as short-term measures until a person or family with an identified housing need is permanently housed in public owned buildings or by approved housing bodies. We need to allocate, as the Labour Party has proposed in its alternative budget this year, an additional €1.43 billion in capital for the delivery of housing in 2023. In this year's budget we would have invested enough to deliver 20,000 social and affordable homes in 2023.

According to revised estimates, the target for social housing units through old build programmes in 2022, was 9,000 homes. These targets are unlikely to be met. Approved housing bodies were this year to deliver 3,850 homes, with 400 through the capital assistance scheme and the remainder through the capital advanced leasing facility. At least another 100 were to come through the national regeneration programme. The balance of approximately 5,050 homes would come from the local authority housing budget of €1.238 billion according to the Government plan. The proposed build programme under Housing for All in 2023 is to deliver 9,100 social homes in all. That is nowhere near sufficient given the needs and targets this year, targets that will not be met in any case.

As provided for in our costed alternative budget, we would provide an additional €835 million in funding from excess corporation tax receipts to build an extra 2,900 local authority homes next year on publicly owned land.

We propose to more than double the annual delivery of cost-rental and affordable housing. These two streams would ensure that 4,000 affordable-purchase homes and 4,000 cost-rental homes would be delivered in 2023, partially funded through the scaling down of the help-to-buy scheme and the first-home shared equity scheme. I remind both the Minister and Minister of State of the reality of the deadweight nature of these schemes, as enunciated by the ESRI and the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform, and the inflationary effect on the cost of purchases by first-time buyers.

As noted by previous speakers, the answer to our housing crisis is staring us in the face. It is fundamentally about scaling up social and affordable housing provision. In reality, Housing for All does not come anywhere close to meeting the demand that exists and that we will face in the future. There needs to be a refocusing and a genuine national effort regarding social and affordable housing. It is on this that the Minister will be judged.

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