Rory Hearne (Dublin North-West, Social Democrats)

I thank Sinn Féin for bringing forward the motion today on voids in council housing. I have worked for many years in the area of public and council housing. One of the key issues is that local authorities, historically, for the past 30 or 40 years, have been not just undermined but effectively decommissioned in their role in housing. I remember this clearly from when I worked in council housing in Dublin for many years. I worked as a regeneration worker in social housing flats on issues of voids and tried to work with the council and communities to get social housing delivered properly. I remember speaking to many of the council officials during the latter years of the Celtic tiger and into the crash. During the Celtic tiger period, Government policy had decommissioned local authorities from their role in housing and the private market was seen as the way forward in delivering housing. We had the introduction and main focus of policy on Part V, the delivery of housing through private developers.

Of course, within all this, local authorities staff left and were not replaced. Unfortunately, within councils, we never saw a focus on, and delivery of, public housing as a public good. I contrast how councils view housing and their housing stock with, for example, our teachers and our education system or our nurses and doctors and our health system. We do not deliver public housing as a public good whereby we see this as our role. It is a council's role to ensure housing stock is up to the highest standard and is delivered as a public good and a human right in the same way we see that education and health must be held to certain standards. Of course, this is part of the problem. We do not have a system whereby local authorities are held to account.

While I have been and am critical of local authorities regarding attitudes to tenants and the failure to deal with issues, there is no getting away from the fundamental cause of the problem, which is that local authorities have not been given the resources or responsibility to treat and deliver public housing as a public good and human right. That is a fundamental missing aspect of our housing policies. In my own areas of Ballymun and Finglas, there is boarded-up social and council housing, which is so frustrating. Indeed, it is more than frustrating. It is deeply upsetting to people whose families are in homeless accommodation and who look at these boarded-up council flats while they are in homelessness, are unable to access social housing or have huge issues in overcrowded rental properties.

It is not acceptable that voids are left for months and in some cases years. There is no excuse for these properties to be left like that for so long. The issue of tenant in situ is linked to this. I spoke to Dublin City Council and have raised this in the Dáil before. The changes the Government has made to the tenant in situ scheme are resulting in local authorities having less funding to purchase tenant properties where tenants are at risk of homelessness. This is directly leading to homelessness, because local authorities are being told their acquisition budget is to go towards tenant in situ schemes and that they will not be able to invest in the same way with regard to remediating properties they are buying through tenant in situ. Where a local authority wants to prevent a person or family becoming homeless, it must decide whether it is taking it out of the maintenance budget, which again results in the issue of not addressing problems like voids, and it is forced to make decisions between taking people out of homelessness or trying to address voids and other issues. Local authorities should not be forced to make that decision. They should be able to retain the tenants in place in homes, to buy those homes and to renovate voids.

Another issue I want to raise relates to the Minister for housing pulling funding for social schemes that were due to go ahead in Dublin, including some in my constituency, in Ballymun. These public-private partnership projects, which I have huge problems with as a way of delivering housing, were due to deliver social housing in several areas but the Minister has now informed Dublin City Council that he is pulling the funding for them. It is absolutely shocking that the Minister is pulling funding from social housing projects that were ready to be delivered in some of the areas most in need of social housing in this country and in parts of Dublin, as I said, from Ballymun and other parts of the city. An emergency motion that was passed at Dublin City Council last night called on the Minister to reverse his decision to cut funding to these social housing programmes. It beggars belief that in the middle of a housing emergency, the Government would pull funding from projects about to deliver and build social and public housing.

Some of the councillors at the meeting last night asked whether there is an anti-public housing agenda within this Government. They asked why the Government was cutting funding from a scheme that had been all set up. Mary Callaghan, a local councillor of ours in Ballymun-Finglas, has done huge work in trying to progress social housing projects. She and other councillors described the full withdrawal of funding for these projects as a gut punch. I ask the Minister of State to raise this project with the Minister.

I was at the housing committee today and listened to the Housing Commission talk about its report and the huge work that went into it. It was shocking to hear members of the Housing Commission talk about the way they have been treated by the Department and the Minister for housing. Some said they have done a great deal of work for different public bodies and Departments down through the years and had never been treated so badly. They asked why the Housing Commission report was ignored by the previous Government and the current Government when the report specifically talks about local authorities, with a number of proposals. The report says we need to achieve the target of 20% of our housing stock being social or public housing.

What does this mean in terms of numbers? Currently, we would need to double the number of social housing units in this country. If we were to do that within ten years, as Professor Michelle Norris said today at the housing committee, it would mean delivering 18,000 social housing units every year for a decade to reach that 20% target. We are nowhere near delivering that number.

They make the case in this report that fundamental to solving the housing crisis is getting back to building social housing, and central to that is local authorities. The councils need the capacity. Policy needs to be shifted to allocate in a way that says clearly that local authorities are public housing providers. Just as our health system and our hospitals deliver public health, our local authorities need to deliver public housing. This means having the capacity to maintain it properly, invest in it and be able to build it in the first instance. Professor Norris made an interesting suggestion - it is in the Housing Commission report - involving the creation of local authority housing delivery organisations that would have the responsibility to deliver housing and manage it. That needs to be looked at.

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