Aideen Hayden (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister to the House and hope that he will be here again soon to discuss the social housing strategy and to have a more wide-ranging discussion on the private rental sector. We could expand the debate on homelessness into one that concerns the private rental sector. I also extend my sympathies to the family of Jonathan Corrie. No society can call itself civilised when people are sleeping on the streets. I welcome the Minister’s announcement of the special forum on homelessness to be held tomorrow. The people he is gathering together, the local authorities, the elected representatives and members of the voluntary organisations are the ones with the real capacity to provide solutions to the problems we face. It is a positive development to include Archbishop Diarmuid Martin and I welcome his commitment to bringing on stream church property to house homeless people.
It is unfortunate that Jonathan Corrie’s life has had a lot of media attention over the past three days. It has got much more attention than he got when he was alive. A certain amount of the media reporting focused on certain issues in his past and his history of substance abuse. It is important to bear in mind that we are facing a serious crisis in homelessness today. It did not start yesterday or the day before but we have to acknowledge its changing nature. The real issue we see now that we did not see five or six years ago is that people are homeless today because housing is too expensive.
I am chairperson of Threshold the national housing charity. I welcome the people in the Gallery from the Dublin Region Homeless Executive and the Peter McVerry Trust. I commend the work of other voluntary organisations, Focus Ireland, the Simon Community and the Society of St. Vincent de Paul. One might get the impression because there has been so much talk about homelessness recently that frontline organisations have not been grappling seriously with this problem for a long time. We are very much ad idemabout what needs to be done. Almost every voluntary organisation that I am aware of cites the significant increase in rents as a major cause of homelessness. Almost without exception every voluntary organisation that I am aware of has said that we absolutely must change the rules on rent supplement and increase the rent caps. Anybody can read the daft.iesurvey and see that €950 will not secure family accommodation in the Dublin region. That is a fact. Last October, Threshold published a report which stated that 50% of social welfare tenants getting rent supplement were topping up their rental payments out of their social welfare payments. They were going without food and heat and putting their children into poverty because they could not afford to pay their rents.
We could talk for a long time about how in the past 25 years we came to depend on rent supplement and why so many people live in the private rental sector instead of social housing where they ought to be with the kind of security that would give them. The fact is they are living in the private rental sector. The State cannot pretend they are living anywhere else. The Minister cannot turn around and pretend that a real rent is €950 when actually it is €1,400. We have to step up to the plate because people are losing their homes day in and day out because they cannot afford to pay those rents.
I have heard the argument that if we pay real rents we will push the rental values up. I have looked at rental values over the past few years. There were three successive cuts in rent supplement over several years and not once did rents fall. We have to consider the evidence for saying that if we increase rent supplement we will push up overall rental values. The issue is more significant than that. It is a question of who stays in their home. Our priority has to be keeping people in their homes and preventing them from losing them. All the voluntary organisations have seen people who say they could keep the roof over their heads for €100, €150 or €200.
I was gratified to hear the Minister mention the tenancy protection service. Since it was set up in June it received 2,560 calls, of which 1,111 families were at immediate risk of losing their homes. To date 313 tenancies have been protected. They have got into the protocol. That is a bit like the planes hovering over Heathrow Airport. They have to land eventually. We can say that the service has been successful in the short term in protecting people but the problem is bigger than that. While I very much admire what the Minister has done on social housing construction, with the best will in the world, we are 12 to 18 months away from providing any real new social housing construction. I respect the fact that the Minister has approximately 600 voids coming on stream and has pledged 25% of them to people who are homeless. However, 1,111 families are at immediate risk of losing their homes. That figure is escalating daily. We have to accept that if we are going to depend on the market to house people privately, we will have to pay market rents because if we do not they will be displaced by people who can afford to pay more.
I know the Minister is concerned about constitutional issues arising from rent certainty. DKM Economic Consultants was against it but the National Economic and Social Council, NESC, has come out in favour of it. Every voluntary organisation that I am aware of has come out in favour of it. People need certainty. They need to know that their kids will be in the same school in a year’s time. Nobody is suggesting landlords should not get a fair return. That is why I do not believe there will be constitutional issues. That return, however, has to be limited by the consumer price index or some reasonable rate of return if that money was invested in Government bonds and so forth, taking the cost of providing that rental accommodation into account. I ask the Minister to consider that again.
We were spending €512 million on rent supplement in 2010. We are spending €344 million on it in 2014. Some of that drop is due to people returning to work, which is excellent but a significant amount of it is due to the fact that people simply cannot access housing at those rent supplement limits. I ask the Minister to ring-fence rent supplement, ensure that every penny in rent supplement stays in rent supplement and does not go into anybody else’s budget.