Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank Sinn Féin for bringing forward the motion. I have been involved in politics for 20 years, having previously been at council level since 2004, and one of the big issues I have seen with housing, even when we were building houses at the volume that was required, related to how to manage the housing stock we had. I recall, when I was involved in building houses, going back three months later to find some of the houses boarded up. From the very start, therefore, we have started off wrong by putting in place a very flimsy housing liaison officer system. If we take Galway county as an example, we have about five of them to serve the county. They, at one stage, were the people who kept their eyes and ears on the estates in order that standards within the estates and tenant behaviour would be corrected and kept right. Alas, that is now gone, because the housing liaison officers are tied up in paperwork. They are tied up sitting at desks, looking at computers, rather than being out on the ground and we need a lot more of them. Providing them is not a cost; it is an investment. I say that because we need to make sure tenants understand their responsibilities but we also need to make sure landlords, that is, the local authorities, understand their responsibility as well.

I know of houses built in Gilmartin Road in Tuam in the late eighties that we demolished five years ago. They were new houses at the time, built with taxpayers' money, and more new houses were built in their place. They had to be knocked down because they had fallen into disrepair, given they were not being managed by the local authority, which did not have the money to do it. Other estates we have built have gone that way as well. Then, when there is a drop in standards, some tenants are inclined to drop their standards as well, and that is when real problems are created in estates. The first step we need to take is make sure we empower the local authorities with the resources they need to manage the existing estates in such a way that standards will not fall, whether in respect of the tenancy or the quality of the building.

Some previous contributors talked about dampness and black soot on walls and other issues that arise, all of which is true and is happening in a lot of estates. In my experience, however, one of the problems is that we take out old timber windows and put in new, fine, sealed, double-glazed PVC windows, but we do not do what we should do around the windows to make sure, first, there is ventilation on the window and, second, that the damp courses are set up such that water will not come in. These are small things, but they cause real problems.

Moving on to the new housing estates we are building, this is another area where we are sleepwalking into another disaster over the next ten years. We are building houses at the pace that is required, and more if we could do it, for social housing, but we do not give the resources to the local authorities to start the management of these estates now, rather than waiting for five or ten years, when things will start to go wrong. The houses we are building now are more technical in nature. There is much more equipment and zoning of heating.

It is all technical and needs to be serviced, upgraded and kept right, otherwise we will lose guarantees. We have solar panels, batteries and all of this but how do we maintain them now? How do we train our tenants to know how to use them properly so they get the best value for themselves. We do not do that. We give people a tenancy agreement and we tell them what they are responsible for, walk away and do not come back until there is a problem. We are creating a huge asset in this country, which is our social housing stock. Taxpayer's money is being used to deliver it but we have to put the additional money in place now to make sure we manage it and keep it to the highest possible standards, the same as how anybody would keep their house rather than waiting for it to go into disrepair again.

The other issues I want to raise, which have been raised, are the housing adaptation grants, the mobility grants and the housing aid for older people. I raised them at the Joint Committee on Disability Matters with the then Minister of State, Deputy Kieran O'Donnell. The review was completed in March and was with the Department for Public Expenditure, NDP Delivery and Reform, which was looking at the costs. I expected the review to be published within a month or two. I come across situations day in day out where people have bathrooms with baths in them and they want to get a wet room. It would cost maybe €7,000, €8,000 or €10,000 and they are not getting enough of a grant to be able to make the transition. It would keep people in their homes for longer, keep them out of hospital and would also save the State an awful lot of money.

Construction costs have gone up and the Government has not increased the funding to take care of that increase in costs. Income threshold levels also need to be increased to allow more people to get a better grant. The last thing I hope will not happen is that we say there is more money in the grant scheme and expect local authorities to provide that additional money as a percentage from their own funds because they do not have it. This has to a be real Government action to make sure these grants, which are very good, are appropriate. The staff in every local authority are doing wonderful work processing the applications, but at the end of the day there is so much more that could be done for people to keep them in their homes living independently for longer. It is one of the things that can be done very handily.

The retrofitting programme scheme for local authority houses is very slow. The local authorities say they have programme so they will not do anything with a particular house until it has been through the programme. That could be two or three years down the road. Again, this causes a huge number of problems because people are living in dampness or in the cold, with a range that is not working or a chimney that does not pull right. A lot of these houses still use solid fuel. We need to make sure we fast-track the retrofitting of the houses. We need to improve and increase the number of resources we have within our housing departments to look after all of that maintenance. We have to invest in it otherwise we are devaluing the national asset we have, which is our local authority houses. The most important issue is that we realise that is an asset we have. We are housing people but the houses are owned by the State and we need to maintain them. As a previous speaker said, if a private landlord had some of the local authority houses in the condition they are in he or she would be before the RTB and there would be serious ramification but that does not seem to happen when the local authority is involved.

There are a lot of things happening, as was set out by the Minister of State, Deputy Dillon, earlier but not enough is happening and it is not happening quickly enough. Some of it is down to staff resources but there is also merit in building up our in-house maintenance teams in each of the local authorities. If we do that, over the next five to ten years we will have an efficient working maintenance crew in every municipal district that would be able to take care of problems as they arise rather than waiting for an engineer to go out and look at the problem, come back and have to do a bit of paperwork to get a contractor and it is then maybe another five or six months before anybody visits the site.

Finally, there is a vacant property grant of €50,000 and €70,000 for private houses but there are still vacant houses within the local authority housing stock. We have voids and the time it takes to turn the void into a habitable house again is way too long. We have people who are looking to get a social house and I have seen houses that have been empty for three, four or five years and that is not right. We need to be able to utilise our housing stock for the benefit of the people who need the houses. I thank the Ceann Comhairle for the opportunity to contribute and Sinn Féin for bringing forward this motion.

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