Darragh O'Brien (Dublin Fingal, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The amendments concern cost-rental provisions. Amendment No. 6 will insert language to illustrate matters that, under section 33, the Minister may prescribe as mandatory terms in every cost-rental tenancy agreement. As with social housing, it will not be the Minister who is the landlord for cost rental. However, the power to prescribe mandatory terms in tenancy agreements will allow the Minister to ensure there are common standards throughout the sector. It is our intention that there will be only one cost-rental sector in Ireland, subject to the same regulation irrespective of who the landlord is.

It was always intended that these mandatory terms would cover key points such as the setting and review of rent and security of tenure in line with provisions in the Bill. It is prudent, however, to make this explicit and to provide that the Minister may prescribe other incidental matters, that is, the little details that need to be concluded for cost rental to become a working reality. We will have, by the time this legislation has passed, a national cost-rental scheme and will publish the regulations and criteria for eligibility in the coming weeks, both for this and the affordable purchase scheme.

Amendment No. 7 clarifies a point concerning limited rent increases under the cost-rental model. A tenant will make his or her first monthly rent payment at the new, higher rate at least 28 days after receipt of a valid rent review notice, rather than the date on which it was issued. A tenant will, therefore, have at least four weeks in which to make, for example, arrangements with a bank to alter a standing order. The notice will run, as is most prudent, from when the tenant has received the notice document. Even though a monthly rent payment will fall within the four-week notice period, tenants will not have to pay the new, higher rent rate. They can pay at the old rate and settle the small difference with the landlord at any time during the following three months. While this may differ from the rent review system in the private rented sector, this should not be surprising. We should think of cost rental as a new system with its own processes and timetables, and this amendment will make the process run much more smoothly for tenant and landlord alike.