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

On behalf of Sinn Féin, I thank the individual members of the commission and its secretariat and all those other individuals and professionals who assisted it in its work over the two and a half years. This is, as the Minister of State said, an incredibly significant piece of work. It is on a par with the National Economic and Social Council, NESC, Housing in Ireland 2005 report. It is a benchmark piece of work which I would like to think all of us will return to on a regular basis as a source of ideas as well as new thinking.

I also welcome today's debate but, of course, a debate is not enough. I hope we get the Government's support when the Oireachtas housing committee is formed to ensure we can further this discussion in a more detailed form by inviting in former members of the commission and others to interrogate, scrutinise, talk and think through the implications of all of its recommendations for housing policy, irrespective of whether we agree or disagree with them.

There is a role for the individual members of the commission. I urge the Minister to discuss with them what they can do to promote their work, beyond the Dáil Chamber or the committee, with wider sectors, whether through engagement roadshows or other kinds of activities.

Before I talk about the detail of the report, I will make a comment on the response of the outgoing Government and the incoming Administration with respect to the work of the commission. The outgoing Government's response was deeply disappointing. When it was forced to publish the commission's two reports, it falsely claimed, in my view, to be implementing the majority of the recommendations. That is something the Minister knows caused quite a lot of annoyance to commission members as well as to others. While I appreciate the Minister telling us there has been a lot of work done on the interdepartmental working group, we would like some detail. How often has it met, what has it done and is there documentation that can be released to Members? Likewise with the Housing Agency because, for the life of me, I have no idea why the Housing Agency was asked to do costings for anything.

That is the function of the Departments of Finance, public expenditure and reform, and housing. Again, however, because the Housing Agency is an experienced body, if the Minister will share further details about its work with us, that would be helpful.

In the absence of any of the detail to which I refer it is hard to judge what has been done at all. Of course, the Government has spent nine months running scared in respect of this matter. There was no launch of the commission's report. The outgoing Minister was given the task of circulating the report to members of the Oireachtas housing committee. He refused to do that. As stated previously, there was no promotion. It was also striking that there was no reference at all to the Housing Commission report in either Fianna Fáil’s or Fine Gael's election manifestoes. I strongly challenge the position of the Minister that the substance, let alone any of the detail, of the commission's report is in the programme for Government, but that is a discussion we continue to have. I welcome that the Minister met with the commission shortly after taking office. That is a positive. I welcome that the incoming Government has allowed us to have this debate, but the proof will be in the extent to which the commission's report is implemented.

I will talk about the headline recommendations of the commission's report and then go through, in what little time I have, many of the sections. It is interesting that the most important part of the commission's report - its devastating critique of not just the previous Government's record on housing but also of those which preceded it - was absent from the Minister's and the Minister of State's comments. Let us remind ourselves of what it said. It spoke about systemic failures and "ineffective decision making" in housing policy. It said that policymaking was reactive and that "risk aversion dominates". They are its words, and not mine. It said that all of this is "undermining affordability". One of the most damning criticisms was that there was a "failure to successfully treat housing as a critical social and economic priority" and that the outgoing Government and those which preceded it had "one of the highest levels of public expenditure for housing, yet one of the poorest outcomes". These are damning criticisms. I genuinely hope that the Minister will absorb those criticisms because the commission did not make them lightly.

The good news is that the commission went on to say in the opening section of the report that there are clear solutions if there is a commitment to address the issues. It used the phrase, which the Minister will hear from other members of the Opposition today, that, "Only a radical strategic reset of housing policy will work." That means not more of the same, and not tinkering round the edges, but something fundamentally different. That involves tackling the housing deficit, which I will come back to in a moment. It will require, as it said, emergency action. It will also require, crucially, the increasing of social and affordable homes to 20% of housing stock, something that has so far been absent from any Government commentary. What does all this mean?

First, according to the commission, it means we need an output of an average of 60,000 new homes per year every year for the next five years. Not only do we need that output, but it needs to be front loaded. The commission recommends hitting 60,000 units by 2027. That is an enormously challenging task and different to the Minister's proposals. The implication of its comments on social and affordable housing was that the delivery would need to be at least doubled to at least 20,000 units per year on average. None of that is in the programme for Government or the current draft of the NPF. Nor was it mentioned by either the Minister or the Minister of State.

It is important to remember that the commission produced not just one report, it produced two. There is no comment of course on the recommendations to hold a referendum to enshrine the right to housing in the Constitution. At least now we know the Government is not going to do it and the charade of the previous programme for Government is dispensed with. As the Minister stated, there are 11 sections and 83 recommendations. I will focus on some of the key ones in the time available.

In section 3, on meeting housing requirements, the issue of the deficit is absolutely crucial. It is wholly absent from the NPF review document. We had an exchange with the officials before the general election and they could not answer our questions on how they got their figures. What is important to understand about the deficit is that if you do not address it, it grows each year. The deficit they talked about was the mid-range of 235,000 units. If you do not adequately increase overall output to meet that year on year, it grows. In fact, when a number of high-profile members of the commission read the programme for Government, they commented publicly that the Government was not addressing the deficit and that it was therefore going to grow. The Government should please listen to them and what they are saying and revise its NPF targets upwards. Likewise, they said policy needs to be based on assessment of actual housing needs. The idea that you would wait until 2027 to do a review of those already inadequate targets in the NPF review document makes no sense. It should be done annually. It should be fully independent of Government. It should utilise the best expertise in the country and be published for us all to respond to. I look forward to the debate on the national planning framework review, but if the Minister of State, Deputy Cummins, does not get those numbers right then he will be failing from the beginning. I again urge him to engage with the experts on this matter, so we do not end up having a row about the underlying numbers.

With respect to section 4 and delivering supply, the housing delivery oversight executive is one of the most important ideas in the commission's report. It is one of their emergency actions. Of course, as the Minister knows it was rejected by his predecessor and is not in the programme for Government. It is interesting that the way in which he describes this, both in his interview at the weekend and today, is a bit different. I am not yet clear as to whether he is fully embracing the idea of an independent body of people who know how to deliver housing in the public and private sector and other agencies. If he does that and it is fully independent of the Departments that often act as a constraint on delivery, it could be interesting. However, we obviously need to see the detail of what will be involved. There are interesting propositions about establishing high yielding housing delivery zones and enhancing the powers of our local authorities, which is something the outgoing Government was doing the opposite of. The land price register is one of the few elements of the commission's recommendations that is in the programme for Government. I would again like to know the detail of what the Minister is proposing and when, but that is something on which he could have the support of this side of the House. There is then a cluster of recommendations on infrastructure, land and finance, all of which are key to increasing and accelerating both public and private sector supply.

I turn to the issue of finance, because if I hear another Government Minister telling us that the public sector cannot do it all I really am going to pull my hair out because nobody on this side of the House has ever said that. That Department of Finance report the Minister referred to talked about an annual requirement of €20 billion. They are saying €18 billion of that needs to come from the private sector, which means only €2 billion of State investment being used for housing delivery despite the fact that the State's capital commitment is between €4 billion and €5 billion. Of course, the reality is that the State has to do more. We need an annual capital investment by the State on social and affordable housing in the region of €8 billion, but far more of that needs to go into direct capital investment and not acquisition through turnkey, Part V and others. On the private side the issue is not whether we need more private sector capital or not. It is about what kind of capital to deliver what kinds of homes and in what manner. I will come to the detail of that later.

The next two sections of the report relate to cost, quality and capacity. Again, these are hugely important in terms of the standardisation of our standards, condition surveys and surveys of existing stock, particularly public housing stock, and building workforce capacity. I welcome that the request has gone in for planners to be put on the critical skills list, but how long will it take? That is something that should be happening as a matter of urgency. I know Deputy Cummins agrees with me on that but let us get it across the line as quickly as we can. Much of these sections of the Housing Commission’s report we agree with, and they are contained in some detail in our own alternative housing plan.

With respect to the private rental sector, I think this is one of the weakest sections of the commission's report. There was clearly a deep division as referenced in the footnotes. While I think there was an attempt by the commission to reach consensus, as a consequence of that it is quite an ambiguous section. I think we can all agree there are some good suggestions. The reference rent depends on the detail of reference to what, and how it operates. However, we are still of the view that we need to see a temporary ban on rent increases. We need to link rent reviews to an index made up of issues including wage inflation and there needs to be the use of reference rents for new rents and properties coming into the market. We have proposals in respect to that.

The Minister indicated that it is possible to protect renters and attract institutional investment. What is not possible is to allow rents continue to increase in order to attract that investment. There are better ways to attract the capital required for private home building than allowing landlords to either increase rents in existing tenancies or to increase rents between tenancies. I warn the Minister against any such proposition because I believe it would be counterproductive and result in little extra supply. What it will do is punish already hard-pressed renters who are paying rents that have never been higher.

Section 7 relates to affordability.

In some respects, this was one of the less satisfying aspects of the report because the focus needs to be on how to bring the all-in cost of development down to achieve greater affordability. It is interesting to note that the commission recommends phasing out the help-to-buy scheme, something the Government is not willing to do, and wants it to be replaced by an equity scheme. The problem is that this does not address the issue of the inflationary impact of such measures or bring costs down. Our alternative housing plan sets out in great detail better ways to derisk the private residential development sector by removing barriers and reducing costs to allow far more good quality homes to be built. It details a range of measures including HBFI, HISCo, planning, master planning, a targeted development levy and water connection waiver for SME builder-developers who are building homes for people to buy or for self-builders.

The section on social housing is one of the strongest. It has the largest number of recommendations, 16 in total, with many of these in alignment with our own party policies. Not only does the section require a dramatic increase in overall output but, exactly as the Minister has said, it also requires a really radical structural reform of how we finance, deliver and maintain our social housing stock. Again, if I am to take the Minister at his word and if he is interested in those proposals, there are areas where we could work together. Crucially, if it is his proposition, as per the programme for Government, to deliver an average of 12,000 new social homes a year, that will not cut it. It is nowhere near what the Housing Commission has said is required. It is also crucial that we get the Department of Finance, the Department of Public Expenditure, NDP Delivery and Reform and the officials at the Department of Housing out of the micromanagement of project delivery. They must trust, empower, fund and staff our local authorities and approved housing bodies to work with building contractors to build the homes that people need. With respect to cost rental, if the Minister does not understand by now that cost rental is in a deep crisis and that the increasing unaffordability of those units is going to be his main challenge alongside delivery, he needs to think again.

Sections 9 to 11, inclusive, are really important. Section 9 relates to on rural housing. Of course, until the Government publishes the rural planning guidelines, we will be no further on. There is also a need to provide supports for people to build sustainable homes in rural communities. Section 10 deals with inclusion and section 11 relates to environmental sustainability. Again, these contain many good suggestions. The Oireachtas housing committee has done work on some of these areas before and we would like to continue to work with the Department and the Ministers in the future.

In the final few seconds I have, I will say that it has not been possible to do justice to this report in the 15 minutes I was allocated. The Oireachtas committee needs to be allowed to do more. I urge the Government to let us do that. Unless it listens to what the commission is saying about targets, the delivery of social and affordable housing and structural reform of the system and unless it introduces the radical reset of policy that is required, it will be more of the same and more tinkering around the edges and the Minister will not achieve the things he says he wants to achieve. If that is the case, we will hold him to account. If, however, he wants to implement the radical reforms of this report and other recommendations from those of us in opposition, we will work with him.

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