Holly Cairns (Cork South West, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

It is now more than three years since the then Taoiseach, Deputy Micheál Martin, gave a very clear commitment. In response to questions from my colleague, Deputy Catherine Murphy, he said he was opposed to the State entering long-term leasing deals for social homes. To quote him directly he said, "No local authority should be on the other side of this, engaging in a long lease with these institutional investors.” He followed up that a few weeks later with a very clear statement, "Long-term leasing is bad value. That is my view and I continue to make that clear."

The practice would be phased out, we were told, except it was not. In the Business Post at the weekend, we learned that the State is continuing to enter into these deals and the rents being charged are through the roof. Deals with rents up to €3,200 per month have been agreed. That means that over the course of a 25-year lease, the State is spending more than €900,000 on a single social home. Having spent nearly €1 million to rent it, the State then hands the home back to the developer or the vulture fund. The State pays through the nose and is left with nothing except the bill - no asset, no home. In total, the State has agreed to almost 9,000 of these deals at a combined cost of nearly €3.2 billion. All of these deals come with upward-only rent reviews, which are not subject to caps in rent pressure zones.

You could not make it up. Quite literally, if we wanted to design a worse way to provide social housing, we could not. Every single aspect of the deal is bad for the State and investment funds are loving it. These sweetheart deals are a cash-cow for them. There is literally no downside. They lock in sky-high rents, include upward-only rent reviews and ensure they retain ownership of the asset at the end.

The Taoiseach has spoken a lot recently about common sense. Do these long-term leases sound like common sense to him? Do they sound like value for money? Does he stand over them? Or, if we are honest, are they necessary only because of the failure of this and successive Governments – failure to tackle the housing disaster, failure to meet its social housing targets and failure to deliver on Government commitments? One of those commitments, let us remember, was a promise to phase out long-term leasing. When will the Government end long-term leasing of social homes and when will it actually meet its own new-build social housing targets?

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