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

It is outrageous that the debate on this Bill is being guillotined. I still do not fully understand all the implications of the legislation. This way of proceeding is wrong. As my party's spokesperson on housing, I consider myself fairly clued in and focused on the issues. This legislation is not being given adequate scrutiny is to what precisely it does. That is a problem and a matter of concern to me. I listened to what the Minister said earlier about the Bill and I will listen to what the Minister of State says at the end of the debate. We probably will vote for the Bill but I have concerns. Given the absolutely atrocious housing crisis in this country, there is no more important subject than housing and, specifically, the delivery of social and affordable housing by approved housing bodies by way of cost rental. I am concerned that legislation dealing with AHBs and the cost-rental sector is being rammed through in this manner. It is way out of order. This is the kind of scenario in which things can be done that might have consequences that could be of concern.

One of the Bill's stated objectives, if I understood the Minister correctly, is to provide for the registration of all AHBs that would otherwise go over a cliff edge and become technically ineligible to operate. That situation will be rectified in order that they can continue to operate. Otherwise, they would become unregistered, if I understood correctly. This has something to do with our constitutional objectives and the question of meeting housing need. I did not hear any example from the Minister in his speech as to where there was a problem in terms of the constitutional objects of AHBs in respect of their property. What might be the problem? We need examples. What other objectives might they have for their assets that are not about alleviating housing need? The very least the Minister of State owes us is an explanation as to what those problems might be.

I have a concern arising from the experience of the growth of the AHB sector in Britain as a substitute for local authority housing. I recognise the role AHBs play. Many of them do a very good job in providing social housing and cost-rental housing. However, I am worried that some AHBs, particularly in the UK, have developed commercial agendas and imperatives that are not really about the provision of social housing. They have become quite corporate. I would not like to see anything slipping in under the radar that would allow that sort of situation to develop here. In my area, most of the new social housing coming on stream is coming via the AHBs rather than the local authority. For all the Government's talk about ramping up social housing delivery, most of it, in fact, is not being provided by local authorities creating new council housing. The provision is being delivered via, or bought by, the AHBs and will be managed and run by those AHBs. As I said, AHBs should play a role in the delivery of social housing. Many of them do commendable work. However, I have serious concerns about the continued retreat of local authorities from being the central driving force in delivering social housing. My belief is that there is a longer-term agenda in this regard. In fact, it is fairly well articulated at a lot of meetings of housing experts and groups. In essence, the agenda is about doing away with differential rents, as we know them in local authority areas, and replacing them with cost-rental provision, thereby, in effect, doing away with social housing for a lot of people in the long term.

I believe that is an agenda. I think certain people believe local authority rents are too low, that we need to increase them and that cost rental and keeping social housing thresholds fairly low are a vehicle to do away with traditional council rent and differential rent. I am concerned about all these things.

Seeing as we are discussing AHBs, I will also express concern about a particular development in my area, which I hope the Department will look into, St. Germaine in Ballybrack village, which was bought by an AHB in conjunction with the council. The tenants moved in three to six months ago. There are 31 homes there, and the residents are mostly women and young children. The place is chronic with damp. This is new-build and there is damp everywhere. These families were delighted after many years on housing lists to get housed, but it is absolutely shocking beyond belief that houses that were newly built and that people have just moved into are rank with damp. Are we here all over again with the Celtic tiger in terms of stuff being built and now bought for social and affordable housing with public money but where there are serious defects? That needs to be looked into as a matter of urgency. I have advised the tenants, whom I am working with now. There are also problems with the green areas. The building has not been built to the plans, according to the tenants. I wonder about the role of the local authority, seeing as this was bought in conjunction with the local authority. Even that relationship between approved housing bodies and local authorities is a very important one. That is why I really worry about legislation that deals with that. Will this create less accountability as to what approved housing bodies do in terms of the delivery of social housing? Somebody did not do their due diligence here if the place is rank with damp and, according to the tenants at least, not built to the plans. Responsibility has not been taken for the green areas that were designated, for example. They are not built as people understood from the plans. I hope something is done about that. I have advised the tenants that they have the right to go to the RTB but, quite frankly, they should not have to do so after three to six months in new social housing. It is unbelievable, and it is not the first instance of this I have heard.

I hope the following is a better story. It is slightly on the other end of the spectrum. We have been campaigning for many years now to get the State to buy the St. Helen's Court development in Dún Laoghaire, which was in the hands of two different vulture funds that tried to mass-evict all the tenants, essentially to drive up the value of it, because if you evict all the tenants, you can then increase the rent. There have been 15, now up to 17, of those apartments in that development sitting empty for almost a decade right across the road from my office. It is absolutely shameful. These vulture funds wanted to try to mass-evict people. It was only because we resisted and protested and campaigned that none of those tenants were made homeless. We campaigned to get the State to buy the homes so they could be provided for social and affordable housing, but nearly a decade on they are still empty. I understand that Clúid was trying to buy them and the sale fell through. The last I heard was that Simon was trying to buy them. It would be a victory for people power and our campaign if eventually they were to be bought, but why on earth is it taking this long? In this case, maybe due diligence is being done, but that is a lot of due diligence and I see other places being perfectly refurbished. It is an insult to families who are homeless in our area, who are in emergency accommodation and hostels in town, who are coming into my office week in, week out, in desperate housing crisis situations, that right across the road 17 apartments lie empty. They are perfectly good apartments. In fact, they were refurbished a number of years ago and they are sitting empty. It is a disgrace. They are still in the hands of a vulture fund. It is to be hoped they will soon be in the hands of an approved housing body. Again, I do not quite know why it is not the local authority that is taking them. I do not really understand that. Who is making these decisions that it is an approved housing body and not the local authority? I am in favour of these purchases. I want to see more of them, given the slow delivery of direct construction of social and affordable housing, but can we do it right? That is another point I wanted to make.

To move on to the cost-rental end of things, there is a big problem with cost rental. Some of the others may have alluded to it. I have raised it several times. To be eligible for cost rental, you need to have an income below €66,000 and above €40,000 if you are single, or above €40,500 and all the way up to about €48,000 for some of the biggest families. That is in our area. I know these figures vary from area to area. The problem is that most of the people who are just over the social housing income threshold will not be eligible because they will be considered unable to pay the rents being charged for cost rental. They will be between the two brackets, as in they are earning and are not entitled to social housing, but because the approved housing bodies, the developers or whoever it is who is running the cost rental are charging rents that are too high, they will be told, "No, you cannot afford that rent. You are not eligible." These are precisely the people who have been hard done by with the refusal of the Government to raise the social housing income thresholds. Many of these people will have been on housing lists for ten or 15 years, thinking that eventually they will get there and get allocated a social home. Then they get a pay rise which takes them slightly over the income threshold. All their 15 years waiting on the social housing list is gone and now they are not entitled to cost rental either because their income is still too low because it is just over the threshold and not enough to pay the rents being charged for the cost rental, such as €1,400 for a two-bed, or €1,200 or €1,300.

I rang a council worker who got knocked off the social housing list and was really frustrated about that fact. He was an outdoor worker in the council when the new cost rental was being delivered in Enniskerry. I rang him really excited and said, "I know you lost all your years on the social housing list, but you might be able to get one of these cost-rental homes." Then he took one look at it and said, "You must be kidding. I am a council worker. The rent is €1,200 a month. I am a single person. How could I possibly afford that?" Of course, he is right; he cannot afford it. However, he is not entitled to social housing either. Something has to be done about this. Either we lower the rents for the cost rental, based on people's income and ability to pay, or we raise significantly the social housing income thresholds to make those who are caught in this limbo position eligible for something. Of course, if you go over the threshold, you are also not entitled to HAP, so you are not entitled to anything. You are completely caught in limbo: cannot afford cost rental, cannot get HAP to get housing in the private market and not entitled to social housing. It is absolutely crazy.

Something this Bill should have dealt with is what happens if you are in a cost-rental house and your income goes down. What happens if you are deemed eligible on income grounds but then your income goes down for some reason, for example, you lose your job, and you go below the threshold? Maybe it just goes down and you are still within the cost-rental limits but you now have less money to pay the rent, which is fixed because it is not based on your income. What are you supposed to do? Will you get any financial support in the form of HAP? No, because you are over the social housing threshold. You should do but you will not unless this is rectified. If you go below the social housing income thresholds, will the cost-rental tenancy now become a social housing tenancy because you are now below the threshold for cost-rental housing and above the threshold for social housing?

These issues need to be addressed but they are not being addressed.

There is this business in the Bill about the allocation scheme for cost rental. As I understand it, there is a problem. Currently, it is a lottery to get it, which is fair enough on one level. It is a bit fairer than what is going to happen in Dún Laoghaire with the affordable housing in Shanganagh this Wednesday. The scandal over the Oasis tickets will look like a tea party compared to what is going to happen on the website of Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council when the 50 or so affordable houses go up. It is whoever gets in first at 12 o'clock. I suspect the website will crash. What happens then? It will not surprise me if it crashes because there is going to be such a demand for those houses. I do not see how it is possibly fair, to be honest. The number of hoops people will have to jump through online is going to be a nightmare for huge numbers of people. It is going to be an absolute nightmare. We will see how that works out.

We have to have a fair allocation scheme for these things. In this Bill, if I understand it right, landlords and developers can make an allocation scheme which is different from the local authority allocation scheme. While the local authority allocation scheme is problematic, at least it is democratically accountable. There is at least some prospect of elected representatives of the people saying we need to change the housing allocation scheme to prioritise homeless people, for example. On what basis will landlords or developers be changing the allocation scheme and to whom will they be accountable in that regard? I have concerns about their ability or their right to do it and what sort of allocation scheme they might establish.

One group of people who should get some priority is precisely those people who may have had ten or 15 years on a housing list but lost them all because they went a few quid over the threshold. There is not going to be any dispensation for them. After all those years waiting, they will just lose it all. They are going to be in a lottery with limited opportunities or chances of actually ending up with a cost-rental home. There needs to be serious deliberation about how we are going to do the allocations. I am bit worried, given we have so many different AHBs and it is such a fragmented sector, about the sort of allocation schemes they might come up with, how exactly all of that will be made transparent and whether there will be accountability, consistency, fairness and so on. I am concerned in this regard.

On a more general point, it is incredible to me that, in the budget last week, with the biggest budget surplus the State has probably ever seen and with the €13 billion extra available from the Apple tax money, the Government announced plans for social and affordable housing in which there was not a single extra social, affordable or cost-rental home over and above what had been previously committed in a plan that is failing disastrously and is not impacting on the level of homelessness or the housing crisis which is blighting the lives of thousands of people. I cannot understand it. Whatever about using once-off windfall payments for current expenditure, it makes absolute prudential sense, as well as societal sense, to put those billions of euro into dramatically ramping up the number of social and affordable housing and into making sure social and affordable housing is actually affordable for the people it is supposed to be assisting. We got nothing new in the budget on any of that, which is really shocking. It begs the question whether the Government is serious at all about trying to solve this problem.

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