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

The Government is seeking to dazzle and fool people with once-off measures but the reality is that poverty, deprivation, financial hardship and inequality are not once-off phenomena. They are systemic, and once-off measures will simply not cut it. Despite the attempts to dazzle people with these once-off measures, the net fact, when you look closely at this budget, is that taking into account the cost-of-living hikes, the rise in inflation and increasing rents, ordinary workers will be worse off afterwards. People on disability allowance, pensioners and people who are dependent on social welfare payments will all be worse off as a result of the budget than they were before. Of course, the corporations, energy companies, banks and property speculators are enjoying a bonanza in profits.

We have seen a shocking and ever-growing concentration of wealth at the top of our society, being enjoyed by corporations and super-wealthy individuals, and the gap between the very richest in our society and ordinary, working people, who are being hammered with the cost of living and the housing crisis, is getting ever wider.

Given the enormous budget surpluses available to the Government and the extraordinary increases in profits that corporations have seen, we were one of the wealthiest countries in the world going into this budget and we had - the Government has - the resources to eliminate poverty and genuinely protect people with disabilities, pensioners and the vulnerable. What has the Government given them? It has given them a miserable €12 a week that is not even close to compensating for the cost-of-living hikes people have suffered over the past year. Let us put this clearly in context. To be at risk of poverty, you have to be earning about 60% of the median income. That means that to be above the poverty line, you need to earn €318 a week. The Government is giving people a miserable €12 on top of €280 a week for the basic social welfare payment or disability payment, and for pensioners, €12 on top of the €265 they get. This will leave the overwhelming majority of pensioners, people with disabilities and the most vulnerable people in our society living in poverty at a time when we have unprecedented resources available to the Government. When it could have, at the stroke of a pen, eliminated poverty, we will leave hundreds of thousands of our citizens existing still in poverty, crushed by increased in the cost of living.

The failure to provide for those with disabilities and for the additional costs of those with disabilities is utterly shameful. A cost-of-disability report shows people with disabilities incur additional costs of between €9,000 and €12,000 a year. What have we given them? Nothing, effectively. The once-off payment of €400 does not go next to near compensating for the additional costs people with disabilities have to endure. We could and should have given at least an additional €50 a week to those with disabilities. Let us remember that during Covid, when we introduced the pandemic unemployment payment, we set a baseline of €350 for people who were put on that payment. That is what disability activists and campaigners have been saying should be the benchmark for those with disabilities. You could argue that should be the case for everybody, but we should give social welfare increases that at least keep people above the poverty line and genuinely account for the additional costs people with disabilities have to suffer.

In the case of workers, again, the Government is trying to dazzle people with minor reductions in the USC and changes in tax bands and thresholds, but its budget documentation makes clear workers will be worse off. Inflation is running at 5%, although the consumer price index shows there was actually a 6.7% increase in the cost of living over the 12 months to August. What are workers getting? For anyone who wants the reference, it is on page 16 of the document on tax policy changes. Somebody on €25,000 will get 1.1% extra, as will somebody on €30,000 or €35,000. For somebody on €40,000, it is 1%; on €45,000, 2.2%; on €55,000, 2%; and it is similar across the board. Ordinary, low-, average- or modest-income working people will get only a 1% to 2% increase in their incomes against a background of at least 5% inflation. In reality, that is a pay cut. It is a significant cut on top of the pay cuts in real terms that workers suffered in the previous year. That is the truth. For all the smoke and mirrors of supposed tax changes, once-off payments and so on, workers will end up worse off.

Let us put the energy credits in context. Last year, there were three €200 energy credits. The consequence of that, as we discovered with the figures that came out recently, is that, currently, before the winter months start, there are 250,000 people in arrears on their electricity bills and one in four people is in arrears on their gas bills. That is for the summer months, before people have to turn on the heating to stop themselves freezing as we head into the winter, and the Government is going to give them less this year than it gave them last year. What they got last year was not enough to stop hundreds of thousands of people ending up in arrears; this year, it is less. More people are going to suffer fuel poverty, more people are going to be afraid to turn on the hot water, have a hot shower or turn on the heating as we head into the winter months, but do we do anything about the profiteering of the energy companies? Not at all. In the first six months of this year, the ESB earned more in profits than it did across the entirety of 2021. That is absolutely unbelievable. It doubled its profits in the course of two years to over €670 million in just the first six months of this year. The company is profiting off the energy misery of working people, pensioners, people with disabilities and people on low incomes. These people are already in arrears and facing into the winter months. It is quite scary when you consider what they might face.

Then, of course, there is the issue of housing. In that context, this budget is just a shocking, unbelievable failure. The Government has done nothing above and beyond the Housing for All plan, which is failing catastrophically. Record numbers of people are homeless. To give the example of my area, as I have explained ad nauseamin this House, the Housing for All targets in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown, which will probably not even be met, would result in more people being on the housing list at the end of Housing for All than are currently on it. That is even if the targets are met. This is against a background where, in my area, you would be waiting a minimum of 12 to 15, and sometimes 20, years for a council house if you put yourself on the list. At the end of Housing for All, if we stick to the current plan that is failing so badly, more people will be on the housing list in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown in five years' time than there are now because the Government's plan fails to take into account the number of additional people coming onto the list who cannot afford the absolutely shocking rents and house prices that are completely unaffordable for the vast majority of working people. More and more people are forced to go onto housing lists but the plans to build social and affordable housing are woefully, shockingly inadequate. In terms of capital investment, to use the jargon of the budget, there is a marginal increase for housing, from €2.3 billion to €2.5 billion. That will only take the cost increases into account, however, so there will be nothing extra and there is no change to the targets for social and affordable housing.

At at time when we have record budget surpluses and billions of euro in windfall corporate tax revenues, I cannot understand why the Government does not see it as a good idea to use those billions to build and acquire more social and affordable houses and refurbish the tens of thousands of vacant and derelict houses across the country. The Government repeats this mantra that we should not be using that money for ongoing current expenditure in circumstances where we cannot rely on it for the future. Even if I accept that argument - it has some merit - it does not apply to dealing with the housing crisis. If you do not build the social and affordable housing with the money we have, you end up spending more on current expenditure - housing assistance programme, HAP, rental accommodation scheme, RAS and leasing - which will be more of a fiscal problem in the future than using the money available now to buy, build, acquire and refurbish public housing. Doing the latter will save us money. It will help resolve the housing misery being faced by people who are trying to find accommodation they can afford.That is like looking for a needle in a haystack for the majority and is driving so many of them into homelessness. If the Government uses that money to build, buy, acquire and refurbish social and affordable housing it will save the State billions in the future. It will put us in a more sustainable financial position than this crazy reliance on HAP, RAS and leasing.

The Government is obsessed with the model of relying on private landlords and is pouring in hundreds of millions of additional euro every year. Almost €1 billion in current expenditure is now going to landlords. Even in that completely misguided system, the Government will not even raise the flipping HAP thresholds in line with rent increases. If it is going to persist with this ridiculous way of trying to address the housing crisis, the least it could do is ensure that the HAP thresholds are sufficient for people looking for HAP tenancies to be able to find somewhere within the thresholds. These people cannot find places, however. The highest homeless HAP threshold for a family in my area is €1,900. If you go on daft.ieor myhome.ieand try to find a one-bedroom home for €1,900 you will not find it. You definitely will not find a two-bedroom home. When you are talking about three- or four-bedroom homes, the cost is more than €3,000 per month. The thresholds are nowhere near what is needed. It is an exercise in futility and despair to be told to find a HAP tenancy in light of the level of rents in most of Dublin, in my area and many of the urban centres.

Of course, there is then another group of people who are not even eligible for social housing because they are over the thresholds. However, there is not enough cost rental because the amount of cost rental the Government has delivered is pathetic. It is not willing to raise the targets, so an increasing number of working people who find themselves looking for rented accommodation are not even entitled to HAP. They are not entitled to rent support. If they are older, they will not get a local authority home loan or a bank loan to buy a house because they are too old. Increasingly, people who have worked all of their lives and who, often, are hitting their late 50s or early 60s are being threatened with or driven into homelessness because there is no support on offer to them. That problem will grow unless the Government deals with it.

I have a couple more brief points to make. Here is something that has not been mentioned. I am a real nerd and I read the fine print of the Book of Estimates. In all of this failed housing policy, there is one interesting item. There is an additional 44% increase in expenditure for consultancy. The amount paid to consultants to dream up the housing plans that have left us with the worst housing and homelessness crisis in the history of the State has gone up. Listen to this, it has increased from €117 million last year - a shocking figure in itself - to €169 million. That is an increase of €52 million in the money going to consultants to dream up the housing policies that have left us with this housing crisis. You could not make it up.

In terms of the renter' credit, the additional €250 is less than the Government has given landlords. Next year, landlords will get a tax credit of €600. They will get €800 the following year and €1,000 the year after that. This is all based on a spurious claim that landlords are exiting the market. The CSO has shown that we have more tenancies than we had in the past and all that is happening with the sale of rental properties is that bigger landlords are usually buying out the smaller landlords. The actual number of rental properties is increasing. We do not have a problem in that there are not enough landlords; what we have is a problem of landlords charging extortionate rents and making extortionate profits, but the Government wants to give them tax breaks. That is as well as what is happening with the really big property investors, like real estate investment trusts, REITs, and so on, who are getting tax breaks on rental revenues and capital gains.

The mortgage interest relief is a joke. I will give one example, who is Lola, a working single mother. Last year she had an €7,000 in interest repayments. She is going to get €1,250 back. How could anybody sustain €7,000 in additional interest payments? That is what is happening. Tens of thousands of people on tracker and variable mortgages are being crucified by banks that are making shocking profits, and that is the best the Government can do for them. Again, there is no action on the profiteering being engaged in by the banks despite our repeated requests that the Government should taken such action.

There are other things not mentioned in the budget, but which will be coming in soon. Carbon tax increases are coming in the next couple of months, essentially undermining the position in terms of diesel and fuel. Other carbon tax increases next year will effectively neutralise any of the one-off measures the Government has given in that area.

All of this is happening against a background of extraordinary increases in profits. This is never talked about. In 2012, the figure for pre-tax profits was €77 billion. The figure for 2021, the latest available, is €250 billion. Although we do not have a figure from the Government for 2022, we know that the corporate tax revenue has jumped to an incredible €24 billion. Extrapolating from previous years, that means we are at well over €300 billion in pre-tax profits for corporations. Those are enormous increases. They are the winners. The Government protects them and has given them an additional tax break to compensate them for the increase to 15% in the nominal corporate tax rate. It has given them another big loophole in order that they will not really pay any additional tax. It has changed the research and development tax credit currently worth €750 million per year, all of which is going to those same super-profitable corporations. It has also increased the research and development tax credit from 25% to 30%. That is tens of millions in extra money going to companies that already enjoy obscene, staggering profits while ordinary people are being crushed by a cost-of-living and housing crisis. I suppose we should not be surprised that is coming from this Government.

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