Rebecca Moynihan (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for coming into the House. It is good to get a viewpoint of everything that is happening in his Department in the course of the pandemic. When we focus on this issue, we all appreciate the severity of the housing crisis, but local authorities and people go out and make this country tick over even in the midst of a pandemic.

I pay tribute to homeless services, which the Minister rightly identified as doing an incredible job over the course of the pandemic. In March, they launched a great effort to ensure that people had access to beds but also kept infections down within the homeless community which, particularly when it comes to underlying health conditions, was very important.

I want to ask the Minister about an issue I am concerned about. We heard in the Committee on Housing, Local Government and Heritage the other day that homeless workers are being treated the same as other front-line health workers but there is no confirmation of how and when they will get access to the vaccine. It is important that they know the levels they are on in that regard. One person in the homeless services told me that their big concern is that with the virus being in the community at large to the extent that it is, it is homeless workers who are bringing it into the sector.

I note also that the Minister was very badly treated on the front page of the Irish Daily Mailwith regard to advocating for the fire service workers to get the vaccine. The idea that he was trying to get people to jump queues as opposed to advocating for a group of front-line workers who are keeping us safe was a poor reflection on the debate at large.

I heard what the Minister said in terms of people not being turned away for beds, but that message needs to be made clearer because we saw from the “RTÉ Investigates” programme that that was not necessarily the case in terms of how it is being acted upon on the ground. I believe the Minister has been very clear on the direction he is giving to homeless services now, but from a departmental level point of view I ask that he would check and ensure that that is not happening and that we do not have a couple of those cases coming through the system. It appeared to me from the “RTÉ Investigates” programme that we cannot help everybody from everywhere and people are not meant to be travelling anyway. We need to ensure that that attitude does not permeate through homeless services.I want to raise the issue of the doubling of the number of private operators which, since Covid, have taken over homeless services.This was done for good reasons. We needed to expand our bed capacity and ensure social distancing was in place. However, there is certainly anecdotal evidence that many people in need of homeless services do not feel safe going into those operators. We learned from the Oireachtas housing committee meeting on Friday that there have been no inspections of these private operators and they are not subject to the same standards as local authority or charity operators. As a matter of priority, will the Minister draw up those standards for private operators and make sure each of them is inspected?

I also want to raise the issue of planning appeals during Covid-19. I note it is considered to be an essential service and that forms are put online. In my constituency, however, I was waiting over a month for documents to go online. Once they did go online, I was able to print them out and send them to an elderly constituent who was cocooning. There was no other way that he could go to Dublin City Council offices to go through those planning documents. It is simply unacceptable that we are waiting that long for documentation to be put online.

For strategic housing developments, An Bord Pleanála has made access for online payments available but there has been no communication on this to local councillors. At the very least, will An Bord Pleanála send out an update to local councillors to let them know that they can avail of this service? I had to inform several local councillors that it was available. It was a great leap forward but many people do not know that.

While I welcome the eviction ban when people’s movement is restricted to 5 km from their home, we need to look again, as this pandemic rolls out, to see if we can do it for longer. A report in The Irish Timeslast week stated more than 360 people were served eviction notices in the two months after the ban was lifted between August and the return to level 5, and 787 tenants were served eviction notices during the Covid pandemic. This is really worrying because of the crisis in rental property. We also know that these are the people who are most at risk of going into homeless services.

Like Senator Fitzpatrick, I want to address the wider issues around help-to-buy, shared equity and moving people out. I have not commented on the heads of the affordable housing Bill because I want to hold my judgment on it until we see what is finally presented. I note that in the press release the Minister stated he will put in place a number of control measures to ensure that it does not contribute to the growth in house prices and will simply not act as a bridging loan for developers. As I do not know what these controls will be, I do not want to condemn it outright at this stage.

However, I want to address the issue that Senator Fitzpatrick highlighted about the UK's evaluation of its shared equity scheme. The reason people are referring to that is because the Minister referred to the 1% figure in contributing to house prices in his own press release on the UK evaluation from the auditors' report. That 1% involved people in the same month availing of the shared equity scheme in the same area. The argument is that this contributes to house prices over time, not that snapshot in time which was the 1%. That same report also showed that 20% of people who availed of the scheme already own their own house, while 80% used it to buy a bigger house.

The criticism of the help-to-buy again comes from our own Parliamentary Budget Office which stated that people availing of the build-to-rent scheme already had access to a mortgage and they were first-time buyers who were availing of it at the higher end of the first-time buyer's allowance.

When the Minister was in opposition, he brought forward a good Bill that would allow local authorities to earmark a certain percentage of zoned land, up to 30%, at the discretion of the planning authority to first-time buyers.I welcome his commitment to supporting first-time buyers because home ownership is a legitimate expectation for people. However, what we are seeing, certainly in my area, are build-to-rent units. Many people would say if one is opposed to them, one is opposed to housing but that is not the case. There are over 1,088 build-to-rent units and another 320 co-living units got in just before the conditional co-living ban came in. We still have a build-to-rent provider who, three weeks ago, The Sunday Business Postidentified as having 300 vacant units in the city because it does do not want to rent them out. Some four-fifths of Clancy Quay and half of Capital Dock are empty. That is a disgrace in the middle of a housing crisis and a pandemic. We need to seriously look at the issue. If we are supporting build to rent, we need to ensure that these large organisations are not able to control supply into the housing market by leaving units empty.