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

No one was surprised by the failures of the Government's housing policy that were laid out in last week's report from the Housing Commission. I see those failures every day in my constituency office when I meet people struggling to pay rent or find a home, stuck on housing lists for 16 to 18 years and stuck in homelessness. The desperation out there is a direct result of the housing policies implemented by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, supported by the Labour Party and the Green Party, for decades. We are not just talking about ten years, as the Minister said earlier; we are talking about 50 years of failed policy. The report calls for an increase in our social housing stock to 20% of all housing. We used to have more than 20% of our stock made up of social housing. We built tens of thousands of homes when this country was practically broke. The report calls for a return to what we had before the parties of government decided to turn our housing policy into a failed policy to allow the big banks and developers to make profit instead of providing homes for ordinary people.

Nowhere is this failure clearer than in the rental sector. Average rents more than doubled between 2012 and 2022. I assure the Tánaiste that wages did not double in that time. The Government stood by and allowed rents to eat more and more into people's pay packets and their standard of living. What did they get for paying rent of up to €2,500 or more per month? They got a rental sector in which housing standards are not properly inspected, rent controls that, according even to the Housing Commission, are not properly enforced, a clear lack of security of tenure in which people fulfil all their obligations as a tenant and can still be turfed out, and a serious lack of protections from illegal evictions, which have become endemic.

The Housing Commission has clear recommendations for the rental sector. I will focus on one of them, that is, facilitating sales of rental properties with tenants in situ. The report states in section 6:

To facilitate sales with tenants in situ, the rent regulations need to be reformed as rental valuations will be an important component in valuing the overall selling price of a property. In addition, mortgages for the purchase of private rented dwellings would need to allow purchases with the tenant in situ.

This is a clear solution to one of the biggest problems facing renters, namely, the lack of security of tenure, and it would go a long way to ending no-fault evictions and securing renters in their homes. Such an arrangement is standard for commercial property. If it is good enough for businesses, it should be good enough for people's homes. I go further and say there should never be evictions because of the sale of a property. That is in my party's housing policy. Will the Government follow the recommendation of the Housing Commission and facilitate sales of rental properties with tenants in situ?

See this speech in context