Joan Collins (Dublin South Central, Independents 4 Change) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy Healy-Rae for that rendition.

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this Private Member's motion from the Social Democrats. The National Economic and Social Council made a recommendation in its Private Rental in Ireland report last February to consider Danish-style reforms to our laws on vacant properties. In Denmark, property owners must report to municipal authorities if their property is vacant for more than six weeks. That authority then finds tenants that the owners must accept. There are caveats and allowances in this system but it means that effectively no residential property goes more than 180 days vacant. The Government's own advisory body is recommending this but this current vacancy tax of 0.3087% lacks the ambition to really tackle this issue and get people into homes. In Denmark, people pay a land value tax to the local authority as well as a property tax to the central government. This means that land sitting idle is pushed to be used or sold. They have also had successive programmes for local authorities to buy and reuse vacant and derelict properties. I take on board the fact that the State has failed in its own respect in relation to vacant homes in local authorities. All over our constituencies we see properties vacant for two or three years before they are done up to provide housing for people on the housing lists.

This is the same in the north and midlands of England with the housing market renewal programme. This was accompanied by a set of other grants, incentives and programmes that brought 100,000 homes back into use and brought the vacancy rate down to a fraction of what ours is. We all know the famous figure from the latest census of 166,752 vacant homes in the State. I am aware that not all of those are suitable for reuse, but there are currently 9,000 actives notices to quit, 11,742 people accessing emergency accommodation, and thousands more people rough sleeping, sleeping in cars, sofa-surfing, in overcrowded conditions, or just struggling to find a home. A fraction of those 166,752 vacant properties could make a huge difference to thousands of people in the middle of a desperate and worsening housing catastrophe.

The point I am trying to get at is that the Government lacks the ambition to use the tools and resources we have to address the housing catastrophe. A vacancy tax of 0.3087% is a joke in the crisis we are facing. The €20,000 and €30,000 grants for people buying vacant or derelict properties are a joke too. People cannot afford to buy homes; that is the problem. The Government is trying to leave the solutions to this problem up to a market that ordinary people just cannot afford to participate in.

It is very simple. Thousands of people cannot afford or cannot find home, yet we have empty land and houses sitting idle in the State. We need to make hoarding or vacancy prohibitive. Where there are issues, the State needs to step in to resolve them directly. We have examples of what works. Let us make it illegal to leave houses vacant and use State resources to fill in the gaps. This three-party Government, and successive Governments led by their parties, got us into this crisis because they believed that the market and private investors could run a housing market for people and not profit. This belief is being proved wrong time and time again with every rent increase and every increase in homelessness.

Our housing system is broken, but there are solutions: take back the power from the market and private investors and developers; take away the ability to hoard land or housing; start making real State interventions to provide housing; make it prohibitive for private interests to continue to profit off making this housing crisis worse and build public housing on public land; use the €1.5 billion that was underspent on housing in the past three years; and use the billions of euro coming in with corporation taxes where we had Exchequer surpluses of €8 billion to €10 billion this year, and €12 to €16 billion next year. Start building public housing now. Invest in housing. It is a lifetime investment. I have seen a calculation where €1 billion could build 4,000 affordable homes, so €10 billion of the Exchequer surplus could build 40,000 affordable homes. That could start to make a difference.

I will make a point about Tathony House, Bow Lane West in Dublin 8 in my constituency. Tenants there have campaigned to get the council to take over the complex. Dublin City Council have agreed to do this and negotiate with the owner but the owner has gone to ground. There will be a solidarity demonstration this Saturday at 3 p.m. at Tathony House to support the tenants who are threatened with notices to quit, and who are supposed to be out by 1 May. I appeal to people to support this solidarity demonstration.

I support the motion and I thank the Social Democrats for tabling it to increase the vacant homes tax rate to 10%.

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