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

I thank Sinn Féin and Deputy Ó Broin for bringing forward this motion, which the Social Democrats are happy to support. On the eviction ban and the current situation with record homelessness and rents, we simply do not know from the Government what its plan is or what it is going to do. We have not heard from the Government. In fact, we have heard elements of the Government attacking its eviction ban on the basis that it has not brought down the numbers of people in emergency homeless accommodation. It makes you wonder if they have no concept at all of how bad the situation is and how much worse it would be if the eviction ban was not in place.

This is all happening in the context of this Government's failure to spend the hundreds of millions of euro allocated to expenditure in the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage last year. I examined the €340 million that was not spent last year, as it should have been, and that was carried over by the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage into 2023. I also looked at the €240 million returned to the Exchequer. If you consider the amount spent per social, cost-rental or affordable purchase home, given that to build any of those that you borrow as well as put in direct investment, you are looking at somewhere up to 9,000 social, affordable and cost-rental homes which could have been built in 2022 if the Department had not carried that €340 million over into this year and had not returned the €240 million to the Exchequer.

For all the bluster and everything else coming from the Minister this evening, we have not heard why, given the crisis and disaster we are in, he feels it is acceptable for that money not to have been spent or what he is going to do to ensure there is proper delivery next year. Some things could be done on delivery; the Minister mentioned vacancy in local authority homes. The facts, according to the National Oversight and Audit Commission are that there are vacancy rates as high as 7% in the context of some local authority housing stock. That is utterly unacceptable, especially given that other local authorities have vacancy rates of less than 1%. If they can do that, there is no reason why the others cannot.

Something could be done on a much smaller level to get people into homes more quickly. There are delays when it comes to the delivery of Part V homes in the context of when they are handed over. When these homes are completed by builders and developers, there can be delays of a considerable number of months until they are completely finished out and tenants are moved in. Local authorities sometimes only deal with them in large batches when they could be turned around much faster in order to get people into much-needed homes. This would be without building a single new home or spending an extra cent. If that was done more efficiently, it would get people off our housing waiting lists, out of emergency accommodation and into brand-new homes that are finished and ready but empty. That should be done straight away. I would like to hear from the Government what it is doing about these easy wins that could be achieved now.

On social housing delivery, the Government has not addressed the delays caused by the bureaucratic four-stage approval process that is tying the hands of local authorities, sometimes for months or even years, in the context of the back and forth with the Department while waiting for approval. That should be done. There should be an expansion of local authority compulsory purchase order powers to facilitate the development of more housing.

The tendering process for local authorities needs to be changed in order that they do not have to go back out and tender for each individual construction project, which leads to substantial delays and significant and increased costs. Local authorities and housing bodies need to be supported to acquire land banks and improve the pipeline of housing delivery for the next few years. They are dealing with a skills deficit and with the severe skills shortage in the construction sector and in trades more generally. These are practical measures that need to be taken in order to get more housing and more social housing delivery so that we may then not need this eviction ban.

I have said before that the eviction ban is not some radical measure. All it does is temporarily bring us in line with most other European countries where tenants who pay rent and are not in breach of their lease agreements cannot be evicted. We talk a lot in this House, and rightly so, about our membership of the European Union and the benefits it brings. It has brought great economic, social and environmental benefits. For renters, however, it has not brought about the sort of benefits it should. Our renters pay some of the highest rents in Europe and have some of the lowest levels of security. I would like to see us more in line with other European countries in that regard.

It is not surprising - but it was deeply disappointing - that the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage used most of his time to attack Opposition parties rather than talk about solutions. This is what he usually does on the occasions on which he attends debates on housing. He often does not attend such debates. There is nothing new in that regard. I wish to address the serious questions raised about how many new homes were built last year. There are serious questions which deserved to be answered. To be clear, simply asking for answers to those questions is not an attack on the CSO. The CSO is an excellent organisation that does valuable work and produces excellent and valuable data. However, it is not true, as the Minister claimed, that the CSO had fully clarified its figures. In fact, the CSO issued a very short statement in which it criticised the figures from the building control and management system, BCMS, and indicated that the analysis relating to those figures does not account for one-off homes. That criticism does not stand at all because the analysis of some of those figures specifically accounted for one-off homes. When you drill down into the figures from the CSO and the BCMS, you see that most of the discrepancies occur in County Dublin, where there are very few one-off homes and the vast majority happen, not in Fingal, where there are a few one-off homes, but in Dublin city and Dún Laoghaire, where there are virtually no one-off homes. That is a red herring. In looking at these figures, it is important to read information the CSO provides on its methodology. The CSO states clearly that it can only predict and classify new and unfinished dwellings within its methodology to an 83% level of accuracy.

This is nowhere near 100%. It then clarified that when it did a deep dive into its methodology and figures, it discovered it had more instances of false positives than false negatives. It concluded that this results in a bias towards overcounting new dwellings. The CSO itself casts considerable questions over its methodology and figures. It is entirely legitimate for us to ask why there is such a discrepancy between CSO figures, which count not new dwellings but new ESB connections which is a slightly different thing, and the figures from the National Building Control and Market Surveillance Office, which has a legal requirement for people to complete certification of completion. There is a gap of 6,000 between these figures which is substantial.

Any of us who are serious about housing want to know why there is a gap of 6,000. How can it be explained? How can there be such a gap between the figures of two organisations that are serious about their methodology, accounting and data? It behoves any of us who are truly interested in this to get to the bottom of it rather than flippantly attack some Opposition parties that have merely asked questions on it. We all want to know how many new homes were built last year and what set of figures we can stand over. To be quite frank about it, we want serious contributions in the Chamber and not Ministers using a whole load of time simply attacking people in the Opposition. We want to hear exactly what the Ministers are doing now to address these very serious issues with regard to evictions, record levels of homelessness and record levels of rent. Clearly the measures to date simply have not worked.

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