Damien English (Meath West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will try to answer most of the questions I have been asked, but I will have to come back to the Senators on some of them. If I miss any, I ask the Senators please to flag me and I will try to come back to them.

Senator Murnane O'Connor raised many issues relating to Carlow. At one stage she campaigned for a rent pressure zone, but I agree with her in that I suspect that, for most people, to be a rent pressure zone is not a badge of success, so we try to avoid them. She once asked why Carlow was not in a rent pressure zone, and now that it is, she is not happy either. We want to keep rents down, and rent pressure zones are an intervention in the market to try to manage increases in rent. They have not been as successful as we had hoped in some places, but the trends are positive. Some areas are now in their fourth year of being an RPZ, and in some places, mainly in Dublin, the rate of increase has come down a lot and is getting closer to where it should be, which is under 4%. Naturally, we would like it to be less than 4% if at all possible, but rents are beginning to ease off.

There is a supply issue. We have been in Carlow on numerous occasions over the years, and one could see this coming. It was clear that if supply did not catch up, the rent pressure zones would come to Carlow like everywhere else. It happened in my town in Navan, because it is a supply issue. One could rent a house in Carlow, Navan, or Kilcock for half the price four or five years ago. Supply is linked to the cost of housing. There is no doubt about that. Many people tell me it is not linked, but it is. Rents were much lower when there was an oversupply a few years ago. All our efforts are going into increasing the housing supply. Senator Coffey noted that the figures show it is likely that we will supply more than 23,000 new houses by the end of the year. Sustained increase in supply is one of the key ways of bringing rent down, as are interventions such as those mentioned by Senator Gavan and others.Supply is a key issue. We will come back to others as well.

With the supply increasing last year and this year and in view of the planning permissions and commencement notices for next year, supply is on the way up and that is what we need. We need to keep doing that. It should have been done for many years. We lost approximately eight years of construction. They were completely and utterly lost. I will not go into the history of it. Members would not like that. I will not go there, but people will not forget that. We are trying to put plans in place so that it will not happen again in the future. We are trying to manage land and the supply of housing. A key part of Rebuilding Ireland is to develop a sustainable housing construction sector in order to prevent housing shortages and homelessness in the future and that will deliver affordable housing and housing where we need it, not an oversupply of 90,000 in one year and less than 5,000 the next but a managed, steady supply of housing, of approximately 30,000 to 35,000 houses every year. That is what we are going to achieve. Next year, we should build more than 25,000 houses and be on track to build 30,000 in the following year. That is what we are trying to achieve. We want to keep it going at that level. We need to keep doing it, and doing more of it, to bring down the cost of rent, which is far too high. No one denies that.

We are open to suggestions. There was a query about the science behind the criteria for how an area qualifies as a rent pressure zone. The criteria that are set down are based on local electoral areas. We do not just decide to bring in every area. That is not the way it works. Areas must fit the criteria. It is out of our hands. This House set the criteria and they apply scientifically. That is the way it should be done. It is evidence-based decision making. It does not mean that one picks the towns one wants in it; they must fit the criteria. Naturally, we wish they would not fit the criteria because that means the rents are too high in those cases as well.

Reference was made to the social housing income guidelines. I accept that the work has taken too long. We have spoken about this here before. The work on that is more or less finished, and the report is with the Department at the moment. We will present a social housing reform package, which will deal with many of the issues that have been hanging around for some time.