Fintan Warfield (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I move: "That the Bill be now read a Second Time."

We have all seen it in the news: a profile of a makeshift studio apartment skilfully crafted out of an upstairs hallway or granny flat in which the bed is conveniently located a few feet away from the kitchen or toilet, all to be had for €800 per month. Every few weeks, we see these stories in the media. They are often posted by people who are searching for properties online. These stories then make it into the media. They reflect the depths of desperation we have reached in the rental crisis. Such stories will profile an advertisement for a rental letting that screams of the indignity of being a modern renter. It is either a bed in a dorm room shared with several other people, a bed shared with a stranger, or a furnished shed or fabrication at the end of a garden, sometimes in the absence of planning permission. What is more astonishing is that, even after media attention and online attention is brought to these lettings, the advertisements remain online. They are rarely removed by the online letting agent and I presume and expect that most, if not all, end up getting rented out.

It is depressing to go apartment hunting right now. Some landlords seeking to take advantage of the housing crisis and the desperation of many are making such rooms available and advertising them online in the full knowledge that they are not within the law. I will talk about existing legislation and regulations. The Housing (Standards for Rented Houses) Regulations 2017 set out a robust series of measures regarding habitable standards in areas such as ventilation, heating, fire safety, sanitary facilities and basic kitchen facilities. There is good reason for these regulations. They set out a minimum standard so that people can live in a house or apartment and have their most basic needs catered for. Equally, we have overcrowding legislation in section 63 of the Housing Act 1966. However outdated it is, it sets out that people renting in a shared room must have 400 cu. ft. of their own space. This means that cases of beds in dorm rooms shared with multiple strangers and cases of beds shared with a stranger are almost certainly outside of existing legislation and fire safety standards. Council inspectors are struggling to fight against rogue landlordism. Cash-strapped local authorities are largely failing to take on these landlords due to competing obligations and stretched resources arising from the housing crisis. As a result, a lack of enforcement and effective rent control has brought us to a point of desperation. Sub-standard housing is provided for inflated rents. Many tenants are unaware of their rights or lack confidence in asserting those rights because they feel lucky to have a place at all. While we are in the throes of a housing crisis caused by a lack of quantity, the Minister of State will know that we cannot neglect our commitment to quality.It is currently a rewarding time to be a landlord and it should not, therefore, be acceptable that minimum standards should not be met as a result of lack of investment by landlords. The Bill seeks to curb the advertising, particularly online advertising, of substandard rental properties that do not meet existing legal rental standards, including overcrowding and fire safety regulations. This short Bill does not seek to change the regulations; rather, it simply seeks to ban the advertising of properties that do not meet those regulations.

I will quickly outline the Bill's provisions. Section 2 proposes the insertion of a new section 56A into the Property Services (Regulation) Act 2011. It deals with allowing the Property Services Regulatory Authority, PSRA, to issue directions to online platforms and letting agents to remove advertisements that breach current minimum standard regulations within a seven-day period. It also allows for members of the public to report advertisements to the PSRA. Although, the minimum standards regulations are a robust series of measures, breaches are not always obvious from photographs and a threshold of evidence would be required. Subsection (5) would grant the PSRA powers to investigate and consult with advertisers to determine the threshold that may be needed in a manner similar to the code of conduct governing letting agents. Letting agents in our towns and villages do not advertise in their shop windows properties that do not meet minimum standards.

I met the PSRA on this matter and I concede that the Bill may need more clarity. I will table amendments on Committee Stage to achieve that clarity. I will also seek amendments on Committee Stage to deal with instances where the PSRA receives a complaint regarding a property that requires physical investigation. In such cases, it should be able to request the relevant local authority to carry out the inspection on its behalf.

Ultimately, the Bill allows the Minister to set the operation of this legislation. It can only be commenced if he and his Department are ready to go.

Although the PSRA does not currently have a remit to regulate online platforms, no other State body does either. Given its experience in working with letting agents in this regard, it is best placed to achieve an effective response to this problem.

I wish to confirm that social media is included in this legislation and that persons may refer a social media ad to the PSRA in the same manner as a rental ad on any other platform. The majority of social media advertising takes place on Facebook. It currently operates an advertising policy whereby it does not approve ads that are in breach of the laws of any given jurisdiction. This legislation would hold that policy to account. Ideally, social media sites and rental platforms would self-regulate to ensure compliance with this law. I am sure that is a subject which the Minister of State will address.

On the Fine Gael amendment to delay the Second Reading for six months, my opinion and that of Sinn Féin is that it is a dishonest delaying tactic. I wonder if the Government is too embarrassed to vote against the proposal as it stands. In delaying the legislation, is it saying that it is acceptable for illegal properties to be advertised on the market for the next six months? I remind Fine Gael of the most recent time it submitted an amendment to a Bill I brought forward. That Bill, co-signed by Senator Ruane, proposed a reduction of the voting age to 16 in certain elections. The Government stated that it wished to consider the Bill further. Six months on, there has been no engagement in spite of our attempts to bring that about. When we brought the Bill back before the House it was opposed on the basis that a referendum would be held on the issue. However, that has not happened.