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

Yes, I am sharing time with Deputies Paul Murphy and Mick Barry.

The Government has unprecedented resources at its disposal that could have delivered a transformative budget to resolve the housing catastrophe the country is facing, address the crisis in the health service and the cost-of-living crisis and eradicate poverty. Instead of doing that, it has given us a splurge of one-off measures to buy a general election and next year, we will be back where we started. That is the reality of this budget. The Government is trying to dazzle people with one-off measures without dealing with the disastrous crisis we face in housing and homelessness, in health, with the cost of living and with the poverty and inequality that exist in our society. The Government had the resources to do this.

The most shocking failure is in the area of housing, which is the mother of all crises we face and which has impacts on so many different levels. This is about the housing misery and hardship that more than 14,000 people face in homelessness, the well over 100,000 households that have been on housing waiting lists for a decade and, in some cases, two decades for a social home, the tens of thousands of young, working people who can never hope to afford their own home or the many tens of thousands who are paying extortionate rents. With all the resources at its disposal, the Government has done nothing in this budget to address the housing catastrophe we face. Even I am shocked at its failure on housing.

Incredibly, after the Housing Commission said we needed to double our housing output, which means at least doubling social and affordable housing output, the Government figures for social and affordable housing for next year announced in today's budget are the same as those for this year. There has been no change from the Housing for All plan, which has failed disastrously. Last year, the target was 10,000 social homes and 6,000 affordable homes. The target next year is 10,000 social homes and 6,000 affordable homes. There has been no change. That is absolutely incredible. The Government is planning to put an additional €4 billion on top of what it has just put into the Future Ireland Fund and the infrastructure fund before the end of year instead of putting that money into doubling the amount of social and affordable housing to be delivered, which is what is needed next year and for at least five or ten years afterwards. That is absolutely stunning. It explains why the Government refused for six months to discuss the Housing Commission's report. It refused point-blank because the consequences of actually having a discussion on it would have been to admit that, as the commission has outlined, the Housing for All plan accounts for less than half of what is necessary to deliver a solution to the absolutely catastrophic housing and homelessness crisis, which is getting worse by the day and which requires us to at least double social and affordable housing output.

There is no action in the budget to deal with the unaffordable rents being charged. These are now well over €2,000 a month. There is a paltry increase in the tax credit but all of this is money going into the pockets of corporate landlords while rents are racing upwards. It will make no difference. It will just about keep people at the same level of extortionate rent they are already at. What is necessary is for us to cut rents or to deliver social and affordable housing on the scale necessary to allow people not to be dependent on these vulture funds and corporate landlords, which are charging rents that no reasonable person could be expected to pay or afford.

There is no action to deal with unaffordable house prices. Whatever additional money is going into the help-to-buy scheme or any of these other schemes is money that is just going to pour into the pockets of developers and vulture funds. There is no action to deal with the profiteering and speculation of those who control land and the supply of housing in this country. It is shameful that, when the capital resources are available to establish a State construction company that could build social and affordable housing on the public land bank, the Government has failed to do so. We will therefore remain dependent on private developers and investors to deliver the supply of housing, including most social and affordable housing. We are still dependent on private contractors and developers when, even with the best will in the world, they do not have the capacity to deliver what is necessary. Even if they wanted to, they do not have the scale. In any event, what they deliver is too expensive, coming in at shockingly high prices. The development at Shanganagh in my area sums it up. So-called affordable housing is priced at €340,000 to €380,000. That is not affordable but that is all they are capable of delivering because the Government will not deal with the fundamental problem, which is that people who are out for profit control the land bank and are controlling the supply of housing and the capacity to build it. They are only interested in the profit they can make from other people's housing misery. We needed to use this money to develop a State construction company to build on public land and to control the profiteering of those charging exorbitant rents and prices for housing. While it is not a budgetary measure, it also would have stopped the flow of people being evicted from the private rented sector into homelessness.

The Government boasts that it has boosted the health service budget. While it has indeed gone up in nominal terms, from €22.3 billion to €25.3 billion, it must be taken into account that the Government seriously underbudgeted for health last year and then had to introduce a supplementary budget of €1.5 billion. Inflation must also be taken into account. My God, the Government is certainly not able to control health inflation. Never mind bike sheds and all the rest of it, look at the scale of inflation on the national children's hospital. When you add in demographic changes, an older population and all the rest of it, it becomes clear that there is not enough here to stem the crisis in our health service, the misery of the nearly 1 million people who are waiting for procedures, the chaos in our emergency departments and the chronic understaffing in our hospitals and in multiple areas of our health service, including our CAMHS teams, our children's disability networks and public health nursing. There are deficits in all of these areas and many more. These are not going to be addressed.

There is an issue I have raised before and I believe Fórsa workers are protesting about it later this week. Having announced the lifting of the recruitment embargo it imposed on the health service, in June of this year, the Government reintroduced that embargo under a different name - the pay and numbers strategy. A ceiling, a maximum number of staff that can be recruited into the health service, is again going to be imposed next year. According to the budget book, this will be set at 133,000. The Minister says this is an increase of 3,000 on last year but, as the INMO has pointed out, the pay and numbers staff ceiling imposed in June set staffing levels at the same levels as December 2023, meaning that this year would, in the area of nursing and midwifery alone, see an effective cut of 2,000 in the whole-time equivalent number of nurses and midwives. I am sure that, along with the rest of the areas of chronic understaffing, this will more than account for the so-called increases we are looking at.

The reality is that the Government is imposing a ceiling that has nothing to do with patient safety or safe staffing numbers, which is what our healthcare workers and professionals have been telling us is needed. It is obvious when you go into the hospitals. Maternity leave and sick leave are not being covered in many hospitals. When people retire, staff are not being recruited to replace them. People are being pulled all over the hospital to cover for a lack of staffing in one area or another. People are often doing things they are not even trained to do, endangering patient safety. That is the reality of what is going on and it results from the imposition of an effective embargo through the setting of these staff ceilings. There is nothing in this budget that suggests the Government has any intention of increasing staffing levels, sanctioning posts and recruiting the people necessary to get us up to safe staffing levels, which should be the baseline for the funding of the health service. What is going to ensure patient safety? What is going to ensure that health workers have conditions that do not leave them completely demoralised, stressed and overrun? The situation for many of them is so bad that they just do not want to work in the health service and so head off to other countries.

The mental health budget is still less than 6% of the overall health budget, even though it has been stated time and again that we need to get the mental health budget up to at least 10% of the overall health budget.

Another really shocking feature of a budget where the Government has this enormous surplus of more than €20 billion and another projected surplus of €9 billion next year, is that, very importantly, it is coming against the background of staggering increases in the profits of the big corporations in this country and an enormous accumulation in the wealth of the very richest in Irish society. This has taken place under successive Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael Governments over the last ten or 15 years. In a context where we have the resources that could eliminate poverty and give working people a break, the Government has given them crumbs. The European Anti-Poverty Network, for example, looking at the €12 increase, has said that to get the real value of the basic social welfare or pension payment just back to the level it was at in 2020, there would have needed to have been a minimum of a €20 increase on the basic payment. The Government has given the increase of €12. The €20 increase would just have been to get us back to where we were in 2020.

People remain in poverty, therefore, and will remain in poverty. That €12 increase will not cover the accumulated cost-of-living hikes that people have endured and suffered over the last several years since this crisis took off. This was a period during which, I repeat, profits went through the roof and the accumulation of the wealth in the hands of the richest in this country increased absolutely dramatically. As we highlighted in our alternative budget, profits over the last ten years have gone up by 294%, but people on social welfare and pension payments are still going to be worse off than they were in 2020. It is absolutely disgraceful. In our alternative budget, we proposed to raise everybody on a social welfare or pension payment above the poverty level. We have about 700,000 to 800,000 people living in, around or below the poverty level and we proposed bringing all of them above that poverty level by having a minimum payment of €300 and a cost-of-disability payment of an additional €50 to cover the enormous cost of disability. The Government had the resources to do it, but it refused to do it because it is interested in looking after the superwealthy rather than eliminating poverty when it does have the resources available.

I know the Minister of State is shaking her head. I suspect, you see, that people do not even know just the extent of the tax expenditures and tax write-offs that go to the giant multinational corporations because we do not discuss them. I still do not see those figures. I do not know if we are going to see them over the next day or two. I certainly did not see them in the budget package. I refer to the tax expenditures and the shadow budget of tax reliefs, most of which go to the big corporations. Where is the list detailing them and how much is going to them next year? We know. We go to the bother of bringing these tax expenditures and write-offs up at the Committee on Budgetary Oversight and detailing some of them in our alternative budget and they are quite staggering.

The figures are always a year or two behind but they are quite staggering. In 2022, for example, capital allowances to the big corporations amounted to €101 billion, while intergroup transactions amounted to €4 billion in tax expenditures. Losses, including capital allowances brought forward, where these big wealthy corporations get to write-off taxes based on previous losses, amounted to €16 billion. The research and development tax credit, that goes overwhelmingly to the big corporations, amounted to €1.1 billion. I will not go through the entire list, but these sums are enormous and they bring down the taxable profits of the big corporations by tens and tens of billions of euro. This means that these corporations, in reality, pay not the 12.5% they are supposed to pay but about 7%. As we know from Apple, some of them are paying considerably less. The Government did not even want to take that money off them. It fought not to take that money off them. Now that we have that money, virtually nothing additional is being done with it. It has gone into the Future Ireland Fund and the infrastructural fund to be done we do not know what with.

Regarding the money that has been mentioned, the €3 billion, it is not at all clear what is going to be done with it. Some €1 billion is going to the LDA and some extra money is also going into energy, etc. What, though, is this money actually going to be spent on? When we consider the slowness of the LDA in delivering social and affordable housing and the cost at which it is delivering it, it is debatable if it is going to increase in any significant way the delivery or affordability of the social and affordable housing it is supposed to deliver.

For workers, there is an extra 80 cent for those on the minimum wage. I was looking at the Ministers' budget book and those on €25,000 are going to get about €1,400 extra this year, mostly because of the small increase in the minimum wage. Their tax liability, however, will be slightly more than it was last year, which is interesting. The tax changes brought in by the Government, therefore, have favoured the higher income earners. Let us contrast this €1,400, which, again, will not even keep pace, in reality, with inflation and the cost-of-living hikes, with another figure. According to the budget book, people on €127,000, or €125,000, which I think this was one of the examples, while another example concerned people on €114,000, are going to gain more from the taxation changes in the budget than someone on the minimum wage. It is disgraceful. There is no real effort to address the problem of the working poor in this country, who are the lowest paid workers. The people at the top of the income distribution are going to do considerably better.

I also wish to mention higher education, and all we are getting in this area. People need to think about this aspect. One of the biggest problems we have along with the housing crisis, although it is significantly connected to it, is skills shortages. For the life of me, I cannot understand why it is being addressed this way in the budget when we need to get tens of thousands more people qualified in a whole range of areas, including the construction trades professions, the healthcare professions and teaching. We could go through the list and include examples in almost every area, including the caring professions. We need more people qualified, but instead of using all this money to eliminate the financial obstacles and barriers to people getting qualified, we have done virtually nothing. It is absolutely miserable. The Government has maintained a once-off €1,000 cut in the registration fee and a once-off 33% reduction in the apprentice contribution. There is also some vague mention of action on postgraduate stipends, although it is not clear what this actually is.

With all the resources available to the Government, it is obvious to me that it would have abolished all fees that are financial obstacles to people getting qualified in higher and further education, in the trades and professions, and so on, where we need to get people qualified. There should also be substantial additional money for student accommodation, not just to provide more of it but to make it genuinely affordable, which it is not currently. Even when on-campus accommodation is built, it is offered at completely unaffordable rents for many, many students. We need, therefore, genuinely free higher and further education.

The Government has done nothing, despite all of the resources at its disposal, to genuinely increase access, create more places and remove the financial barriers and obstacles to people getting qualified in these areas.

In arts, culture and sports, there have been some minor increases but they just about keep pace with inflation. There was a 6% increase in total in arts, culture and sports, with only 3% of in increase in the arts and culture area, which represents just about standing still. There is no significant real increase in the money available and it is certainly not going to address the problem of widespread precarity and poverty among the vast majority of people engaged in the arts, music and performance in this country. We propose, for example, that everybody who applied for the basic income for artists should get it. All the Government is proposing to do is extend the pilot scheme by a few months, which sees money being given to only a fraction of the artists, performers and people who work in the arts who applied in the first place for that support. Again, the Government has the resources to do it. It could also, as we suggested, impose taxes on the social media and big IT companies to fund the arts, culture, and public service broadcasting in a way that would provide security and decent incomes for people who work in the arts. I could go on but my time is up.

This budget is just more of the same from the Government. It is more of the same as it continues the big tax reliefs and tax credits for large corporations, protects the interests of the super rich and does nothing to redistribute the unprecedented wealth and profits that are being made in this country to eliminate poverty, to give working people a decent break in respect of the cost of living, to deliver social and affordable housing, decent health services and other public services that people in this country need and deserve.

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