Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am particularly pleased to speak in the Seanad on "Rebuilding Ireland", which we launched yesterday. It is the Government's new action plan for housing and homelessness. This is a very significant effort by the Government to start a process by which, in time, it will fix a broken property market and respond more effectively to the needs of very vulnerable people who find themselves homeless and to the complexity of those needs. We will start and deliver a dramatic increase in the building of social housing and we will make a big impact on the private sector in terms of getting enough houses of the right quality and at affordable prices built in the right places. This will create some normality in the property and housing market in Ireland.

There is no need to tell people that there is both a broken rental market and a broken housing market. Last year, approximately 12,600 houses were built. A total of 6,000 of those were one-off houses across the countryside. Of the other 6,000, a large portion were from finishing out unfinished housing estates or unfinished apartment complexes. A relatively small percentage of the total were new builds that started in the last couple of years. The extent of the challenge we face is significant in terms of getting to a point where we are building approximately 30,000 housing units per year, which is what Ireland needs. We must increase, quite dramatically, the percentage of social housing built as part of those 30,000 housing units. We have committed €5.5 billion of public money from now to the end of 2021. A sum of €200 million from that will be in an infrastructure fund which will enable us to open up sites that are currently not moving to construction because of added infrastructure costs and so forth, which developers must shoulder and therefore cannot make the margin they believe they need to be able to progress with the project. However, €5.35 billion is for directly providing 47,000 social housing units.

From my perspective, that is the heart of this plan. Ireland's overall housing mix has 7% to 8% social housing, which is a long way behind Europe where the average is approximately 17%. There has been an over-emphasis on reliance on the private sector to deliver for social housing need in Ireland through rent supplement, the housing assistance payment, HAP, and the rental accommodation scheme, RAS. When the rental market gets really squeezed as it is at present, where we simply do not have enough housing units in that market and rents are being driven up, it causes huge pressures on vulnerable low-income families and drives them out of rental accommodation. It is also causing a steady increase in homelessness each week, be it individual rough sleepers or families who are homeless. The State requires a more co-ordinated and determined response to that, with a sense of urgency, which I intend to provide, and the financial backing on which the Government has signed off. I believe the outcomes over time will dramatically improve the outcomes for the many families who find themselves in pressurised situations.

The plan we have put together has five pillars.While it is not the perfect solution and does not provide all the answers, it is a significant step in the right direction. Other measures will be added to the plan as we move forward. At budget time, for example, a tax package will be introduced specifically to support first-time buyers who are seeking to buy new homes. This will provide an incentive to developers to build more new homes for first-time buyers. This type of home is not being built in the quantities or at the price needed because many developers have concluded that first-timer buyers cannot afford to buy homes at the price builders can afford to build them. I will return to the issue of first-time buyers in a moment.

We are starting this overall plan with five pillars and it is not an accident that homelessness is the first chapter or pillar. I will not stand over the current circumstances in which hundreds of families are living for long periods in hotel and bed and breakfast emergency accommodation. This is not acceptable in a decent society and we will change it. For this reason, I have stated that within 12 months, we will no longer use hotel accommodation other than in exceptional circumstances and for small numbers of people. We must provide more sustainable homes, even if these are provided on a temporary basis. Children are growing up in hotel rooms without a kitchen or play room and with insufficient space. They are sleeping every night in the same bed as their parents who have to take them outside to walk around the city for exercise or to try to find a playground and bring them to and from school. This is not how a state should look after its children and, as I stated, we will change this. While this will take some time, I am determined to change the position and I hope many others will help me do so.

In my political lifetime, family homelessness has never been the significant issue it is today, although we have often dealt with and discussed homelessness among individuals who were sleeping rough and so on. The solution to family homelessness is simple, namely, we must find housing units for most of the affected families. While some have challenges caused by family breakdown or mental health issues and require additional supports, the majority of the families concerned simply need a house or housing unit. We need to address this issue by expanding the rapid building house programme. The programme will be trebled in terms of ambition from building 500 units to building 1,500 units. We will force this issue and achieve this target.

We are also allocating €70 million to the Housing Agency to start a purchase programme for vacant properties. Homeless families will be prioritised in using some of these acquisitions and, over time, the agency will be geared up to purchase approximately 1,600 houses.

We are also examining the provision of additional supports for homeless families. I have been working with the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, Deputy Katherine Zappone, a former Senator, to produce more targeted and effective support programmes. We have, for example, signed off on free use of the public transport system for homeless families. We will also introduce nutrition and health programmes, ensure children attend school and receive the education they need and provide the supports children and families living in emergency accommodation require.

This is not aspirational stuff. We have agreed to provide the Health Service Executive with a significant increase in its funding for homeless people. This year, the HSE has a €2 million fund for providing supports to homeless people. This figure will treble to €6 million next year. We also have an agreement with the HSE to work with a service provider which is seeking planning permission for a large addiction detoxification facility in the inner city. We have agreed that the HSE will staff the facility once it has been built at a cost of approximately €2.25 million per annum. The HSE contribution for homeless services could, therefore, increase from €2 million this year to €8.25 million within a few years. This will ensure we are not simply focused on trying to find housing units for people but also trying to rebuild their lives in terms of helping them to take on the challenges they face, whether they are medical, mental health or addiction problems or a combination thereof. This is the least vulnerable people, many of whom are fighting for their very survival, can expect from their Government.

We are also trying to build on what works. It is planned to provide 100 housing units in Dublin under the successful Housing First model. I understand 54 of these 100 units have been provided so far this year and we intend to treble the target to 300 next year because we know this model works. In simple terms, this means providing a person who is experiencing troubles or difficulties with a house first and subsequently developing infrastructure and a support system around the person and making these supports work in helping him or her to rebuild his or her life. Having the stability afforded by a home dramatically increases the likelihood of success and while this approach gives rise to social challenges, for example, objections from communities that do not like it, this is what we are endeavouring to do.

In terms of the response to homelessness, we want to end our reliance on hotels for homeless families within 12 months. We also want to increase the support services provided by the Health Service Executive in the areas of primary health care, addiction and mental health and to respond to many other physical and medical challenges faced by rough sleepers who face uncertainty night after night. Some of them must make a telephone call at 10.30 p.m. to try to get into a hostel such as the Brú Aimsir facility. We must also ensure sufficient emergency accommodation is in place before winter.

Last night, we released the figures on homelessness for June. While the increase in numbers has not been at the same pace as it was some months ago, the number of homeless people continues to increase and the figures are stark when compared with last year.

There is a determination in the action plan to try to respond to, address and work with people who find themselves homeless to secure much better outcomes for themselves and their families. We also want to avoid people becoming homeless in the first instance by providing new supports for people in mortgage arrears and relaunching the mortgage-to-rent scheme, which has not worked for the numbers expected and must be rethought.

Social housing is the second pillar of the plan. Last year, all of the local authorities combined built 72 social houses. While they acquired many more housing units and brought approximately 3,500 voids into use, which was a major success, we are in the ha'penny place in terms of where we need to be in building new units managed by local authorities. We will change this. We have already provided many more staff to enable local authorities to gear up for the new approach. We now need to deliver, which means working in partnership with local authorities, rather than having me beat them with a stick. Partnership must take the form of project management to ensure projects are completed and the streamlining of decision making processes. We have sufficient money to do this in a substantial way.

We have set a target of having 47,000 social houses built by the end of 2021 and €5.3 billion has been committed to achieving it. This is a significant portion of the resources available to the Government and a signal of intent that this issue is our No. 1 priority. We will also rely on and work with the National Treasury Management Agency to try to create off-balance sheet funding mechanisms to deliver significantly more social housing. Of the 47,000 social houses we want to build, approximately 5,000 will be delivered by a NTMA backed vehicle that will fund, in the main, approved housing bodies to build or purchase social housing. We could significantly increase the figure of 5,000 if this approach works and EUROSTAT and the European Commission confirm that the funding for it is considered off-balance sheet.

While the establishment of a housing delivery office sounds like a classic political solution to a problem, in this case, the position is different.Some people have said we should set up a housing authority separate from the Department. I think we would spend the next 12 or 18 months trying to do that and trying to get it right. I am hand-picking and head-hunting the most talented people I can find. They will be put in a wing of the Custom House, where they will work as project managers. They will have autonomy in my Department. Some of them will be experts from local authorities who know how the system works and others will come from the private sector with expertise in project management. They will report to me every fortnight. Their simple role will be to make the rebuilding of Ireland happen in line with the timeframe we have set out. They will need to be able to pursue construction projects, some of which will be structured in a complex way, one after the other. For example, there may be public private partnerships on public land. There will also be some straight build programmes. In other cases, these officials will have to work with private developers to get the decisions they need in a timely manner from local authorities and from the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government if it has a say in the process. We will see how it works. If it does not work, we will change it. I am not one of those people who says that the plan is the plan and that it will be the plan come hell or high water. If there are mistakes in the plan, we will change it. If we need to upgrade, add to or amend the plan, we will do so. My only agenda here is to solve the housing crisis. I need and want the help of Senators in that regard and I will ask for it.

We had a debate in this Chamber the other evening on the important question of the housing needs of people with a disability, Travellers and elderly people. We need to ensure that our social housing build programme caters for the different sectors of society that need social housing support. We had a good discussion on disability in this context last week. I am happy to say that there is a pretty strong paragraph on disability in the new plan. We will develop that as we go. In the case of Traveller accommodation, the approach in recent years has been to accommodate the needs of Traveller families within the broader social housing mix. We are going to review that and assess whether more needs to be done separately from mainstream social housing provision. A similar approach is being taken in the case of accommodation for senior citizens and the elderly. I have just come from Dolphin House where we announced a €25 million urban regeneration project for a great community that has faced all sorts of challenges in recent decades. As part of the overall plan for that complex, a special redevelopment project involving the construction of houses for the elderly will be led by an approved housing body called Fold Ireland. I think that is exactly the kind of mix of tenure that we need to have within these bigger overall projects.

I ask Senators to believe me when I say we are serious about this. I know some people assume that a Fine Gael Minister who talks the talk on social housing does not really believe it. I assume some people are thinking that as they look at me now. I would not have fought for the funding I have obtained if I did not believe in this. I hope people will see it as a signal of intent that the two biggest things I have done so far in this portfolio have been two urban regeneration projects. The project in the north inner city involves the provision of 74 new apartments at a cost of €29 million. The project in the south inner city, which I announced today, involves the provision of 100 new apartments at a cost of €25 million. We are going to invest heavily in this area. We also want to change the way we accommodate social housing as part of a broader mix. Most of the social housing in my own city of Cork was built in the 1970s and 1980s. The vast majority of houses were built on one side of the river and most private houses were built on the other side of the river. As a result of that, there was stigmatisation and unfair and inaccurate perceptions of what it means to be in a social house or a private house. We need to challenge that. By the way, that will not be a comfortable debate for people like me. I refer to what sometimes happens when perceptions are challenged. I think Senator Ó Ríordáin spoke about this issue during last week's debate.

I would like to see public lands used strategically for genuine integration in our social housing projects. We need to see local authorities working in partnership with private developers on developments that consist, in part, of normal private residential housing and in part of affordable housing, affordable rental and social housing. The various forms of housing will be mixed in clever designs so that when people drive into these developments, they will not spot which houses are social houses and which are private houses and will not be able to distinguish who is living where. That is a huge change in the policy approach to social housing in Ireland. It will not be easily done. I will need the help of other political parties to get it done. I will not be helped by those who take a populist approach locally and those who do not like change. That is why the way to start the new approach to social housing involves the strategic use of State-owned landbanks. We need to bring private housing into that mix, rather than trying to force social housing into private housing estates before there is an acceptance of that. Of course, we are going to force that too. That is what Part V is all about. We are not going to allow what happened in the past, when developers bought out their social housing responsibilities, to happen again. The Part V rules that say 10% of private developments have to consist of social housing need to mean precisely that, as far as I am concerned. I hope we will go beyond that by adopting a mixed-tenure approach to development. That would be healthy for everybody because it would facilitate genuine integration within communities. If children should grow up looking over the hedge to their next-door neighbours without making a distinction between social and private housing, that creates the ambitions and the ability to dream big for everybody in terms of what they want to achieve in life. I hope that does not sound patronising. It is certainly not meant to be.

The second pillar is social housing and the third pillar is output, which involves getting more housing built. Some people say to me that private developers should not be allowed to build because they are making margins on the backs of other people, etc. We cannot simply solve a housing crisis by doing everything through public housing. Private housing needs to be a big part of the mix too. If we are going to build approximately 140,000 houses in the next six or seven years, the vast majority of them will have to be delivered by the private sector. There will have to be an increased percentage of social housing as part of that mix as well. What are the blockages at present? The planning system is a blockage, so we are changing it. Any developer who intends to build more than 100 houses will engage in preplanning consultation at local authority level and will go directly to An Bord Pleanála for an application after that. An Bord Pleanála has informed me that it will make decisions within 18 weeks, so we will have a much quicker turnaround time. I am pretty confident that we will still get the right planning decisions. This is not about cutting corners - it is about streamlining decision-making while still getting the right decisions. The reality is that the vast majority, if not all, of large-scale developments end up with An Bord Pleanála for decision in any event. We are trying to make those decisions much faster. We are aware that planning permission has been approved for the construction of almost 28,000 houses in Dublin. However, just 4,500 houses are being constructed in Dublin at present. That discrepancy can be attributed to the fact that the numbers do not add up for some developers because the infrastructure costs associated with opening up sites are too high for them. We have committed €200 million over the next two years to intervene in these circumstances by picking up part or all of the cost of providing infrastructure, such as bridges, roads, gas or wastewater connections. We think that will make a big difference in getting many of these sites up and running.

There has been quite a bit of talk about what we intend to do for first-time buyers. We did not announce the detail yesterday. When there is ambiguity, there is lots of speculation. The Minister for Finance, Deputy Noonan, will announce a package for first-time buyers on budget day. I want to make it clear that this will not be about simply giving first-time buyers the capacity to spend more on houses, thereby overheating a market that is already overheated. This has to be about driving supply for first-time buyers as well. Any package we introduce will be about incentivising the construction sector to build more houses for that market. Currently, this is not being done.We need to increase capacity. We have a problem in that regard at present. The prices for which builders are building and selling houses are higher than what the vast majority of first-time buyers can afford. Therefore, builders are not building houses because they know they cannot sell them. First-time buyers are trying to but cannot get mortgages in order to be able to get on the housing ladder. We have got to close that gap by reducing the cost of building houses. We are doing that through the infrastructure fund, a better planning system, using public land strategically and a number of other initiatives. We will help first-time buyers in terms of getting mortgages. Those who made criticisms today do not appear to understand that the main focus here is about increasing supply as well as improving demand. Otherwise, we will continue to have thousands and thousands of first-time buyers who want to buy houses but who simply cannot afford to do so because nobody is building houses they can afford. That is a crazy situation. All those people then find themselves driven into the private rental market, which puts more and more pressure on the rental system. In turn, this drives those on lower incomes out of that system and into either homelessness or relying on the State, through housing assistance payment, HAP, scheme, rental accommodation system, RAS, rent supplement or whatever. We have to stop that downward pressure which is creating increasing reliance on the State to provide housing outcomes.

The next pillar of the plan is around the private rental sector. I got some criticism on this issue from Fianna Fáil, in particular, and I do not quite know why because its members knew exactly what was coming with respect to this particular pillar. We have made it quite clear for some time that we are committed to a detailed review of the broader rental market between now and end of the year. We were not going to announce a series of initiatives without going through a proper process. We have had a broken rental market for as long as I can remember. What I mean by that is that rents in Ireland seem to be always rapidly increasing or else collapsing, which is a little like the position with house prices. We have a boom and then a bust followed by another boom and bust, one after the other. Everyone jumps on the bandwagon when matters are going well, including the banking system, and then the whole thing gets to a totally unsustainable level and it crashes. My fundamental job, as Minister with responsibility for housing, is to end that cycle, and I am going to do it if I get the time to do it. What that means is creating a stable predictable housing market in terms of price, whether it be rent or purchase prices. We will look at international best practice in terms of how we can do that. We need to do it in a way that does not frighten off investment in the short term. That is why there needs to be proper stakeholder consultation before we finalise any decisions in those areas.

We have made two decisions in terms of early actions. One is what people in my Department refer to as the Tyrrelstown amendment. We want to ensure that when institutional investors sell an apartment complex to another institutional investor, a vulture fund or whomever, that the tenants will not suffer as a result of that change of ownership. Tenancies will remain intact through that change of ownership which is not the case at present. Currently, when a sale occurs, a tenancy starts from scratch, which gives the new landlord an opportunity to hike up rents or evict people, but we are going to change that. Any complex comprising more than 20 units that are being sold together in the same development will have the protection of that new amendment, which is a good step forward. On the other side, we will strengthen the Residential Tenancies Board, RTB, to ensure that if tenants are behaving in a totally irresponsible manner, there is a process by which the RTB can assess the position, make a judgment and get an outcome much quicker. That is also a fair measure. Everybody, from landlords to tenants has equal responsibility here.

We are committed to having a broad assessment - and making decisions on the back of that - of the rental market before the end of the year. Some of the initiatives taken by the former Minister, Deputy Kelly, had a positive impact in terms of insisting on rent reviews only happening on a two-year basis, pushing out timelines to give people notice of change of tenancies and so on, but we need to do a bit more in that area. We will have a good deal of stakeholder consultation to make sure we get it right. To rush it for the launch of the plan yesterday would have been silly. I found the criticism I received for not doing that strange.

I also received some criticism for not doing more on student accommodation. We are doing quite a bit on student accommodation in this plan around new funding models and so on. If we can get students out of private rental accommodation into student purpose built accommodation, we will free up considerable space and we will do much more of that. There is a no-brainer as far as I am concerned. There are approximately between 20,000 and 25,000 students in private rented accommodation who could be in student accommodation, or certainly a proportion of them could. Even if 5,000 of them were to move into student accommodation, that would free up a great deal of space that families could occupy.

I will conclude by commenting on the final pillar. I have been speaking for a while.