Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The Government is in its third year and during all of that time house prices, rents and homelessness have increased. As the Government announced yesterday, it has missed its social and affordable housing targets for three years in a row. To come here and say that is evidence that the housing plan is working takes a brass neck beyond belief.

Let us remind ourselves of the figures from yesterday. If we look at the social housing figures, including both real social housing built and bought by local authorities and AHBs and the leasing through HAP and RAS, the Government missed its global targets by 25%. If we look at the new builds for social housing, the Government missed that target by almost 20%. Most shocking of all are the affordable housing targets. Again, there is a dishonesty in how they are being presented. The figures yesterday suggested that of the Government's target of 4,000 affordable homes, it delivered 1,750, when some 750 of those are not affordable homes but offers of highly risky shared equity loans for the purchase of unaffordable private homes. The number of affordable homes to rent or buy is only 1,000 and some of those cost rentals, as the Minister of State well knows, are not affordable.

If I hear another Government Minister tell us that more social housing was built last year than in any year since 1975, I will break out in laughter because social output today cannot be compared with social housing output in 1975. Why is that? It is because the population is significantly larger and the deficit of social housing in recent years is much worse than it was beforehand. To meet the social housing output of 1975 in per capita terms today would require the delivery of 14,000 or 15,000 social homes, something the Government will not do at any stage during its term of office.

I do not want to hear another Government Minister claim, as the Minister did, that the Government has brought 8,000 voids back into use since coming into power. It is such a dishonest claim. The overwhelming majority of those properties were never voids; they were casual vacancies where the Department provides some extra funding between tenants. They were never long-term vacants or voids and to claim that they were is dishonest. I do not want to hear again that the so-called help-to-buy scheme and the controversial shared equity loan are good for people. They have pushed up house prices. At best, they lock in prices at unaffordable levels, making it more difficult for ever more numbers of people to purchase.

The idea that the Government’s plan is working simply is not the case. It does not have to be this way and as we have said over and over again, there is an alternative. I would like to see a more ambitious housing programme with at least 8,000 affordable homes delivered per year. I want to speak directly to Deputy Harkin's good question. Those homes would not just be in urban areas but they would be in rural and semi-urban areas because every local authority would have a significantly increased budget to deliver more social homes and affordable rental and purchase homes. That means that in rural and semi-urban areas they will be in small clusters or single units rather than just in housing estates because, as Deputy Carthy said, the affordability crisis is as much a rural phenomenon as an urban one. How would those 8,000 homes be delivered? The red tape has to be cut. The four-stage approval, tendering and procurement process is strangling the life out of our AHBs and local authorities. That is why it is taking them so long and it is why that process needs reform.

We also need to see real action on vacant properties. Croí Cónaithe provides a tiny amount of money to deliver a tiny number of vacant units, for which, in many instances, banks are not allowing the drawdown of the mortgages because of a controversy around the treatment of the clawback. The idea that this is somehow a serious approach to vacancy beggars belief. Under our proposal, 20% of all public homes, which would be 4,000 social and affordable homes, would come from vacant and derelict stock. How would we do it? We would give the local authorities the money to buy and refurbish in advance in villages, towns and cities and then we would not just use them for social housing but for affordable rental and purchase.

I do not want to hear another Minister say the Government is looking at new methods of construction again. Governments have been telling us that for years. We do not need the Government to look at it. We have companies, public and private, developing cutting-edge and low-carbon building technology. The Minister of State knows this because it is something he supports. What these companies do not have is a pipeline of contracts with local authorities and AHBs. Until a framework agreement is put in place to deliver that, the position will not improve.

The Government has been in office for two and a half years and its plan is failing. The Government is not delivering, things are getting worse and we have not seen the worst of it yet. That is why Members should support this motion and why we ultimately need an election. We need a change of Government, a change of Minister and a housing plan that is serious about meeting the social and affordable housing needs of working people.

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