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

I thank my colleague, Deputy Ó Laoghaire, for yet again raising what is a very important issue. I want to put on the record my support for the propositions that Carrigaline and the electoral division of Clogherhead in County Louth would be included.

However, I want to disagree with both my own colleague and Deputy Nash from the outset. This is not an anomaly. As somebody who was here going through the detail of the legislation when it was introduced in very rushed and unsatisfactory form in 2016, and as somebody who has dealt with this very specific issue in respect to a portion of Limerick on the boundary of the city and county, and with respect to Waterford on the boundary of the city and county, this has been a feature of very badly designed rent regulation. When the then Minister, Deputy Coveney, introduced the legislation back in 2016, we highlighted a number of problems at that point which we said would lead to the very situation that both Deputies Ó Laoghaire and Nash have outlined today. The first is that if we only introduce rent regulation, it should apply to all renters the same. The idea that you would have a system where a renter who is in Dublin has a 2% cap and a renter somewhere else in the city or in the State can have no cap whatsoever and have rent increases of 20% or 50% - in some cases in Sligo recently, we saw 100% rent increases - is inherently unjust and unfair. We made the point to the Minister at the time and he simply refused to listen. In fact, we went one step further and said that if we create RPZs and then have areas immediately surrounding them that do not have those protections, as is the case in Carrigaline or Clogherhead, that will create a perverse incentive for landlords to increase rents above what would have been normally permissible for fear that at some point they might be caught by an RPZ.

What happened over the seven years since that legislation was introduced? RPZs have continue to expand in concentric circles out from the original designations of Dublin city and Cork city for that very reason. That is not a criticism of landlords. If you think you are going to face a cap in the future, it makes sense that you would try to increase the rent as much as possible beforehand.

A third issue is the question of the electoral divisions. It is simply not correct to say that we cannot have accurate data on rent changes in electoral divisions, particularly those that are on the edges of very large urban areas and, by extension, are becoming part of those urban areas, such as Carrigaline. Of course there are some electoral divisions where we cannot have a sufficient volume of rental tenancies to be able to have robust statistical data. I accept that, but there are other electoral divisions – Carrigaline is one where Deputy Ó Laoghaire rightly outlined the number of tenancies - where we can have robust data. How do I know that? It is because we asked the RTB that in committee at least four or five years ago, and it said it depends on the electoral division.

In addition to the very sensible suggestions Deputies Ó Laoghaire and Nash have outlined, I think we actually have to go one step further and fix this problem once and for all. While we will continue to press for rent regulation that applies equally to all renters, something the Government does not support, we will also continue to press for a ban on rent increases for all renters, which again the Government does not support. Something the Minister of State could support is amending the legislation and having an explicit provision so that where the RTB is satisfied that in an electoral division there is sufficient data to provide for a recommendation for the inclusion of an electoral division into an adjoining RPZ, it has the power to recommend that to the Minister. If we had done that, for example, when we first asked for it in 2017, those people in Limerick and Waterford, who for many years did not even have the paltry protection of the RPZs, would have been protected. Likewise, I think it would ensure that not only in the cases we have today but also in future cases because this is not going to go away and other areas will be affected. Therefore, I think Deputy Nash makes a very sensible suggestion in terms of the use of the existing provisions of the legislation to designate the entire local authority. That fixes that. Deputy Ó Laoghaire has provided a number of mechanisms for Carrigaline. Ultimately the legislation has to be changed. The reason it has not been changed is because it is such a minor technical change to the Bill, and very often they are the things that take the longest to fix.

It is not because I think anybody in government or in the Department is opposed to the proposition. I cannot count the number of times at committee that I and others have strongly recommended amending the existing legislation and empowering the Residential Tenancies Board subject to the availability of the data to recommend the extension of an existing RPZ into a neighbouring electoral division. It is possible and should be permissible and I urge the Government to take that approach.

While the Minister of State indicated his willingness to resolve this issue, he did not outline how he is thinking of resolving it because he is not proposing any changes to the legislation. Like other Deputies, I invite him in his wrap-up to tell us how he thinks this can be fixed and if the propositions put forward by Deputies Ó Laoghaire and Nash provide some mechanism to do that because we will be returning to this at the committee.

I am sure the Minister of State's attention has already been drawn to the report from Threshold that was published yesterday. The Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, spoke lyrically about all the great things that he has done for renters over the last three years since becoming Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage. It is a pity he did not stop to read the key findings of the report before he told people what a good job he is doing because that is not the view of the renters who were surveyed for this important research. In fact, renters have never felt more insecure and renters have never faced such high rents.

I want to deal with two bits of the report relevant to this legislation. A very significant number of renters - about 50% - in this survey are paying more than 30% of their disposable income on rent. Those lower down the income scale are paying a higher percentage. That shows that even with a 2% cap, even if the 2% cap is extended to the areas we are outlining here, these are renters who simply cannot afford that. Given that the 2% can be rolled over year after year, resulting in a 6% or 8% increase all in one go, a 2% annualised increase is simply not acceptable at a time when rents are going to continue to rise because of the Government's housing failures elsewhere.

There was one very concerning finding in the report which is that a very significant number of renters in the survey who are living in rent pressure zones, 37%, have faced rent increases above the 2% caps. I am asking the Minister of State not only to respond positively to reasonable requests from Deputies today and in particular my colleague Deputy Ó Laoghaire who sponsored this legislation and raises this issue continually, and not only to outline how he intends to ensure the protections, poor as they are, within RPZs are extended to the good people of Carrigaline and Clogherhead, but I am asking him to go away and talk to his officials and the Minister about those 37% of people within rent pressure zones who are getting hit with rent increases above 2%. I suspect many of those are being hit with rent increases that are not permissible but they are too scared to raise that formally with the Residential Tenancies Board because of fear of losing their tenancy.

Therefore, we need greater resources for the RTB to be able to take its own investigations against landlords who breach those rules, including in cases where landlords are asking for larger under-the-counter rent increases above the 2% so that all renters have at least the protections that they are meant to have.

Ultimately, we need to go much further, as my colleague said. We need a three-year ban on rent increases. We need a refundable tax credit worth a full month's rent, not the €500 that is available to all renters. Crucially we need that dramatic increase in the supply of both social and affordable cost-rental homes. I know that is something the Minister of State believes in, but it is not something the Government is currently doing. We will argue that point on another day.

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