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

I thank all those who contributed to this discussion. I am not going to get into the war of statistics that these debates often descend into although I am not saying statistics are unimportant. The Minister has to start with acknowledging the truth. When the Government says the number on housing lists has falling it is a misrepresentation of the reality. According to the Parliamentary Budget Office there are actually 122,000 households, if we take waiting lists where people are on HAP, RAS and leasing arrangements, that are not secure tenancies. The reduction in the numbers on the housing list is overwhelmingly because the Government failed to raise the income thresholds. People are taken off the list not because they no longer have a housing need, no longer need social housing support or are no longer in a position where they cannot pay the rents out there or afford the housing prices, but because their income goes slightly over the threshold. They are off the list, it makes the statistics look better and leaves their situation exactly the same. In fact, it makes their situation worse.

I referred to the woman who, with her teenage son, has been in one bedroom in emergency accommodation for four years and is not even entitled to HAP support, never mind a council house, because she is over the threshold. There has been a deliberate policy of not raising those thresholds. I read it in the Government report. In fact, it was Byron Warren, a transition-year student who is in my office this week, who read the review the Government got last November and pointed out that people in Dublin are paying 60% of their income in rent. Huge numbers of those people are not entitled to any financial support whatsoever, whether HAP or social housing. Many of them have been cut off the list because the Government refused to raise the income threshold. At a time when more households than ever need social housing and social housing support, the proportion of people entitled to that support has been slashed from 48% to about 30%. That is the reality of the situation.

The long-term solution is for us to build, on scale, public and affordable housing. We need at least 20,000 public and affordable houses a year. Setting that aside, there is stuff the Government could do now. The reason it does not do it goes back to the point made by Deputy Gino Kenny and others. We need to get something into our heads regarding the housing misery facing hundreds of thousands of families on housing waiting lists, unable to afford rents and so on, and now the desperate people fleeing from Ukraine. That misery is benefiting a certain group of people. In fact, the worse the crisis gets, the more valuable is the rental property of those who own it and the more valuable the lands of those who have planning permission but are sitting on that land. There are 80,000 such planning permissions and their value is clocking up the worse the housing crisis gets. That is the elephant in the room when it comes to the housing crisis. Unless we break our reliance on people who are profiting from the housing crisis, that is, the vulture funds, investors, speculators and property developers, we are not going to solve this crisis. Indeed, there are worrying indications that private builders are starting to slow down their delivery because they do not see it as profitable for them.

Setting aside the bigger ideological debate, we propose some immediate solutions to this problem. First, it should be a case of use it or lose it. If you have a vacant property - there are 48,000 such that have been vacant since the last census and 160,000 in total - you should have six months to use it or, if there is no good reason for not doing so, you will lose it. Of course, there are good reasons in some cases but we must have a proactive policy of saying that if a property is vacant for six months or more, it will be taken over by the State and used to provide social and affordable housing if there is no good reason for not doing so. We need teams of people in every local authority who will go out and pursue those properties and ensure they are brought into use.

We must rebuild the State's construction capacity. The Taoiseach is correct that we cannot rebuild it overnight, but he can stop the situation whereby property is being actively run down. The State and local authorities must start to take on apprentices again and begin to rebuild our direct construction capacity in order that we are not dependent on contractors and developers who, in many cases, are doing what was done in the case of the co-operative housing in Loughlinstown, of which the Taoiseach may be aware, whereby 45 properties are now frozen because the contractor pulled out. We need our own construction capacity to deal with that situation. In any situation, whether people are on HAP or RAS, leasing or, as in Tathony House in Dublin 8, where some of the people are over the threshold and are not getting RAS, HAP or leasing support, where a landlord is selling just to benefit from the high prices that can be commanded at the moment, the State must step in and buy the property. That is not happening and all sorts of excuses are being put up for why that is. St. Helen's Court still has not got over the line. There are 17 empty properties sitting there for three years when people, including children, are in homeless accommodation and so on.

Then we come to income thresholds.

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