Cian O'Callaghan (Dublin Bay North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

Notices to quit give people a feeling of sickness in the pits of their stomachs and cause stress and worry. There is a sense that one's life is being uprooted. Often people in these circumstances talk about how the increased anxiety affects their children. They might tell you about how a child is doing well in school after having overcome several challenges in the preceding few years and that they are deeply worried that a notice to quit and an eviction will uproot that child just as things settle. I am referring to the families in luckier situations. Children with significant learning difficulties or challenges owing to their not receiving the mental health or disability supports they need face major anxiety and distress when an eviction notice is issued.

I thank People Before Profit for tabling the motion. When we hear the response of the Government to it, it seems to us that it is not listening or responding to the points made by us this morning. There has been no engagement. The Government displayed genuine arrogance by not responding and by listing off things it is doing that are part reality but also part fiction. As said before, the figure of €4 billion for capital expenditure on housing is not correct. Not only is it not correct but the Government is actually 30% behind in its capital expenditure on housing right now, according to its own figures published in the September Fiscal Monitor. How is it possible, in the depth of the crisis we have, that it is 30% behind in its capital expenditure? It is scandalous given the considerable hardship that people are going through.

You would swear from listening to the Government's response that it is not aware that we have the highest-ever rents in the country. New rents increased by 9% in the past year. We have the highest-ever house prices. They have increased by 12% in the past year. We have the highest-ever number of people living in emergency accommodation because they have become homeless. In this regard, there has been an increase of 30% in the past year. The number of children living in emergency accommodation has increased by 47% in the past 12 months. There has been no mention of that in the response by the Government, which denies the reality of what is going on and keeps telling us things are getting better. There has been no mention by the Government of generations stuck at home or the huge number of people who are now living in their parents' homes against their wishes. The number of people between 25 and 34 who own a home collapsed from 60% to 27% between 2004 and 2019. I suspect this proportion has decreased further in the past couple of years. The Government is oblivious to the impact this is having on people in terms of their not being able to get on with their lives or become independent, combined with the anxiety and impacts on mental health and well-being.

At the same time as this is happening, over €1 billion in public money is going towards the HAP, RAS and long-term leasing, which is pushing up rents and not directly increasing supply. The profits of those who are exploiting the housing crisis are soaring. Institutional housing investors' profits nearly doubled last year. The amount of effective tax they paid collapsed from 17.9% to just 5.9% last year as their profits soared. The profits of one of the largest house builders in the country, Cairn Homes, jumped by 84% in the first half of this year. While people are massively impacted by the housing disaster, the profits of those benefiting from it are going through the roof. The Government is in denial about the scale of the problem.

I will list a few things the Government could and should do now to address the crisis. We need to increase the delivery of social and affordable homes. We need 20,000 affordable cost-rental and social homes to be delivered per year. Incidentally, this is what the Minister promised during the last election campaign but which he has failed to achieve. We need to tackle vacancy and dereliction. Consider the Government's proposals in this regard. Fine Gael promised a tax on vacant properties as far back as 2017 but never did anything about it. We finally have a 0.3% tax on vacancy coming in but this is designed to fail. It will not have the desired effect. We need a strong, effective and punitive tax to get the more than 100,000 vacant homes back into use.

We also need measures to penalise developers for slow build-out and for sitting on planning permissions. There is a huge number of planning permissions in the system now for projects that are not getting built out. Where there are larger schemes, there is drip-feeding in an effort to control prices. At the same time, the profits of the larger developers responsible for the slow build-out and the drip-feeding of homes are soaring. We need this to be addressed. We need more support to get more small and medium builders back building, allowing them to compete with the larger developers. We need to strengthen the capacity of the not-for-profit sector and local authorities to build more homes. Recently at meetings of the housing committee, representatives of some of the local authorities have said that if they had better resources in terms of staff, they would be able to do more to deliver affordable cost-rental and social homes.

We also need to tackle vested interests that are making huge profits from the housing crisis. Land costs comprise a significant cost associated with new housing. Let me give an example from my constituency that the Minister and others will be aware of, namely a very successful housing development built 100 years ago in Marino in my constituency. The land for the development was bought for less than £5,000; it was bought for £4,974. I realise that was 100 years ago, which is a long time ago, but when the sum is adjusted for inflation, it equates to about €350,000 today. The land cost when the Marino development was built out was 1.5% of the overall cost. Now the land cost is about 16% of the total cost of a development. One can see that if land costs were tackled by the Government – they have not been – it would contribute towards bringing costs down and making homes more affordable. It would reduce the cost of delivering social and affordable homes and make it more feasible.

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