Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Labour Party for tabling this comprehensive motion and giving us an opportunity to discuss what is undoubtedly the most important issue facing our constituents today. We are fully supporting the motion. We have some differences of opinion on policy, particularly with respect to the future focus of the Land Development Agency, but we fully support and endorse the spirit of this motion. Obviously, we will be opposing the Government's proposed amendment.

At the outset, I will say that I appreciate the line Minister cannot always be here. There was a convention previously, however, where the line Minister would have the courtesy to contact the proposer of a motion in advance to explain an absence and I think that is a practice that should be recommenced. I will also point out that during the last Dáil not only did the previous Minister not undertake that commitment but, in fact, he had a terrible habit of coming in, speaking and then leaving before anybody else spoke. Whatever about the political differences we may have with the Minister of State and the Minister, Deputy Browne, I hope they will properly engage with the Opposition in a way that was entirely absent in the last Oireachtas.

I take issue with a couple of elements of the Minister of State's speech. It is simply not the case that local authorities make the decisions on specific public housing delivery in their areas. Any of us who have been in local authorities know that is just not true. The targets are set by the Department. The funding is set by the Department. The funding approvals are set by the Department. The level of micromanagement by the officials in the Custom House on everything down to where the windows and skirting boards of public housing projects go is actually one of the greatest causes of delay. Along with others, we have been calling for the last Government and the previous Government to dramatically reform the process of approval and procurement for public housing, but this is falling on deaf ears. It is also incredibly misleading to suggest that 80% of new social housing delivery is using the single stage process. That is only possible if we exclude all the Part V units, all the turnkeys and all the design and builds. The actual number of projects of the 8,000 to 9,000 social homes delivered last year that used that process is minuscule because of course it is too small, it carries too much risk for the local authorities. Therefore, I urge the Minister of State to use whatever influence is possible to remove the single biggest obstacle for the delivery of public housing projects by local authorities and approved housing bodies, which is the bureaucracy imposed by the Department.

Regarding the Government's proposed amendment to the motion, the problem is that it almost suggests everything is going fine, nothing is wrong and we are just going to continue as we were. If we are going to fix a problem, we need to know what it is. Let us look, therefore, at why the Government did not deliver on its housing target last year. Initially, it was 33,000 units, but this was of course subsequently increased to 40,000 units. There are three reasons. One is because the Government is not meeting its social housing targets. Every year under the previous Government, and last year will have been no different, its social housing targets were missed. That happened in many respects for the reasons I have just outlined, including targets that were too low to begin with. Even worse than that, though, the Government's affordable housing targets were missed by an even larger margin. Last year, the Government was meant to deliver probably about 4,300 affordable purchase and rental homes through local authorities, approved housing bodies and the LDA. It will not be anywhere close to 2,000 units and will probably be closer to 1,000 units in the end. Not only is the Government missing those targets, but the majority of those homes are not actually affordable for people buying them.

The Government is also missing its private purchase targets. The housing plan of the outgoing Government was to deliver, on average, about 11,000 homes to go onto the market for working families to buy every year. The Government has missed that figure every year. It has stagnated from 2018 through to 2023 at about 8,000 units annually. This means that if we want to have a conversation about how we increase and accelerate the delivery of homes, which all of us want to do, we do not start by asking Property Industry Ireland or Irish Institutional Property what they need to do to get more institutional investment into the private rental sector. We ask instead how much more public investment we need to get social and affordable housing to the levels it should be at and how do we support and activate small- and medium-sized building developers to keep building more homes that working people can buy in the private market, including in the constituency of the Minister of State, which will probably not see any affordable rental or purchase units delivered by the State or, if so, it will only be a minuscule number.

Thankfully, the Housing Commission has set out in a lot of detail how to address those issues. Many of us in the Opposition have set out in the same level of detail credible policies of how to do all of that. Is it not remarkable that having ignored the Housing Commission's report for half a year, the only time the Government has started to refer to it is when it wants to justify stripping renters of crucial supports, inadequate as they are. It is also significant that nowhere in the Minister of State's speech or in the programme for Government was there any mention of the recommendations of the Homeless Policy Group. It wrote to the Government earlier this year and set out ten key actions required to tackle the homelessness crisis and they are entirely absent. The big worry here, then, is that the Government is not listening to us, to the homeless sector or to the Housing Commission and this means things are going to get worse. We will continue to hold the Government to account and continue to propose alternatives. At some point in the future, we will have the opportunity to implement those alternatives, but until that happens I am afraid that based on what I heard from the Minister of State today, things are only going to get worse.

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