Rory Hearne (Dublin North-West, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I wish the Minister and Minister of State the best of luck. It is going to be a tough job. All of us here know it is the most serious issue facing the country. I have described it as a social disaster and a social catastrophe. The Minister and Minister of State know it is too. I often speak very passionately and very emotionally and bring forward the cases and human reality of the crisis and I will continue to because we should not get away from that.

Every day hundreds of thousands of people in this country are living this crisis. As I have described, it is causing a mental health crisis. It is causing many young people to leave this country - they are giving up. While I appreciate that the Minister is going to do his best, we need to focus on and give time to a discussion on the solutions that will solve this crisis for those people.

I thank the Housing Commission members for producing the report. It is an important piece of work. I do not agree with all of it and there are issues with people who have vested interests in the property industry playing quite an influential role in policy. For example, regarding healthcare I will make the point again and again in the coming months and years that we do not bring in private operators or private hospitals to tell us how to run our public health system or develop Sláintecare policy. In developing the new Housing for All iteration, I ask that the Minister focus on housing needs. I ask that he focus not on vested interests, but rather the policies that are needed to ensure that people have affordable housing.

Regarding the report, I want to ask the Minister about a couple of things. Why is the proposal for the housing delivery office different from what I read is the proposal in the commission's report for a housing executive oversight body? I want an explanation for that. It seems that the Minister's proposal is different and I wonder why that is the case. It seems a much more limited proposal.

There is another issue in the report, namely, the question of the 20% social housing target. Does the Minister agree with that? Does he have a timeframe for its delivery? I extrapolated the figures. If we aim to reach 20% of housing stock as being social or cost-rental housing by 2035, for example, that would mean we would need to deliver 30,000 social and cost-rental homes every year. Is that something the Minister wants to aim for? Is it a target? I believe it is what we need and that is the scale of delivery by the public sector, through the State, that is required.

This brings me to the narrative that the State is doing all it can. It is not. We will have a surplus of €9 billion. The Minister mentioned different sources of funding available to deliver to the State in different forms. Reference was made to the Apple money. We will have a significant budget surplus. I ask for a response from the Minister to my next point. The requirement of funding referenced is €20 billion. That makes an assumption that 65% of all new homes will be apartments, given the figures presented by the Housing Commission. On the other hand, if we provide 35% of all new homes as apartments, we would reduce the cost to €16 billion.

Currently, we are delivering between 28% and 30% of our homes as apartments. Across this city, we can see that the majority of homes being built are apartments. Can we examine different forms of lower scale housing delivery, such as those in Amsterdam and Copenhagen? Housing in those cities comprises four-, five- or even six-storey developments, rather than 12-storey apartment blocks which, of course, are what the institutional funds want.

I am raising this because I do not agree with the idea that we have to rely on EU institutional funds to fund our housing. By buying into that, we are following the consequential decision that rents have to be raised across the board. That is the argument such funds have been making and, unfortunately, it seems to be what the Government is planning to do.

The Minister mentioned a review of the rent pressure zones. We need to give renters that guarantee. The Taoiseach said that rent pressure zones are being reviewed. The Minister knows that hundreds of thousands of renters across this country are living with anxiety and fear of the rents being increased and being evicted if we bring in a system whereby rents can be increased between tenancies. If there are no rental protections in place from eviction, then we will see a wholesale eviction of tenants, even worse we are what we are seeing now.

Until we have a very clear system that will not allow rents to rise from the end of this year, we should pause the idea that rent pressure zones will change at the end of this year. Renters need that security. We have argued for a rent freeze for three years and the implementation of a no-fault ban on evictions. That is urgently needed, given what the Minister did not mention, namely, the issue of homelessness. I was disappointed the Minister did not mention it. I did not hear him mention it; I am open to correction.

I was sure that was an oversight, but it might be indicative of the Department's, rather than the Minister's, lack of focus and concern about the issue of homelessness. I ask that the Minister put a focus on homelessness and end what we saw on Monday night, in terms of children growing up in homelessness. As I am sure is the case in the Minister's constituency, in my constituency babies are being born into homelessness and emergency accommodation. As parents, how can we stand over that? There are children who have urgent requirements in terms of additional needs, something we saw on Monday night where children with autism or those who require serious medical intervention are growing up in emergency accommodation. How is that acceptable?

We have to go beyond figures and say that some things are unacceptable to us as a country, nation and Government. How can we stand over 4,500 children being homeless? I have done the analysis. It is clear that we have failed to protect renters from eviction because of the fear or policy decision that it will somehow deter investment. In debate after debate on proposals brought forward to implement stronger protections from eviction for tenants, the argument has been made by previous Governments that they cannot do that because it will deter investment. Why is the Government not willing to protect families from eviction when the number one cause of family homelessness is families being evicted from the private rental sector? The Government could implement a ban on no-fault evictions into homelessness. That would be an emergency policy measure and it could be done.

Another area I want to speak on, which is linked to the report, is the right to housing. Again, it is disappointing that the Minister did not mention it. Is the Government saying it will not look at this? Is the Government saying it will not implement a right to housing, which is recommended by the commission? It said:

International experience with constitutionalising rights to housing has demonstrated that changes tend to be incremental ... The Commission is of the view that such an approach is applicable in the Irish constitutional context and that constitutionalising a right of access to adequate housing would provide a guarantee which would evolve over time.

I ask the Minister to reconsider what seems to be his lack of engagement or a decision not to pursue a right to housing in the Constitution. We will push for it again.

Local authorities and bureaucracy have been discussed during this debate. We need to be straight here, and I will be. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael moved away from social housing about 30 years ago. They decided social housing and the councils did not work and were not the way to deliver social housing. The move was under Part V to get developers to provide social housing. It was a policy made in 2011.

Prior to that, during the Celtic Tiger, councils were told, "You no longer do housing." It is very welcome to now see a shift towards needing local authorities to deliver social housing again. However, questions remains. Why are they not doing it on the scale needed? Why are they not meeting their own targets? Why are councils and housing bodies buying from the market rather than delivering them themselves? The Commission clearly states:

The Housing Commission has found that local government has experienced limited access to the necessary staff and financial resources to facilitate the delivery of homes to meet housing requirements. The remit of local authorities has been weakened by policies that direct their role and resources towards control, rather than enablement and facilitation. This has replaced the priority for local authorities to deliver housing themselves or to facilitate delivery by others.

In some key relevant areas, there is limited access to the necessary staff and financial resources to facilitate the delivery of homes to meet housing requirements. I ask the Ministers to increase the resources to the local authorities so they get what they need. We have alternative ways of delivering housing. Will the Ministers look at other schemes and areas, such as the previously discussed Livret A scheme in France? We could leverage €160 billion into social and affordable housing delivery. We do not need the funds. We can do it ourselves in this country. The money is here and we need to develop the capacity to do it. I ask the Ministers to consider that.

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