Rebecca Moynihan (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State. The Labour Party believes in three central tenets of an Ireland that works for all when it comes to housing. First is to secure affordable housing. Second is security of tenure for renters. Third is a more ambitious public housing programme. I will start with some good news from this Government. The schemes that Government trumpets are helping. I use them. I tell people to apply for help to buy or if they want to move outside, to look at the shared equity scheme. We have broken the cycle of sluggish growth in the residential sector. I appreciate that the shared equity scheme has not had the inflationary impact on house prices that I feared and that I warned about.It would be worth keeping an eye on this, however.

While there is some good news with respect to housing - that does matter - it does not really feel good and percolate down when a significant number of people still feel locked out of homeownership. Many people are in insecure rental accommodation and nearly 3,000 children are homeless. We need to increase our targets. We know that work is being done in that way for the growing population we have, but, fundamentally, we still need to change how we structure our housing system. We need to move more to be like places such as Austria, where there is state-led planning and provision of housing by the state. I have always considered the LDA to be the big game-changer in the context of doing something like that but the agency has not stepped up to the plate as yet. The presentation it sent to us all last week sets out the timelines for some of the housing and development which should be taking place.

There are 550 homes to be developed between the LDA and the digital hub, all of which is on State land, and that is being delayed. In the context of Inchicore, which was announced as a flagship scheme in 2017 for cost rental, it has yet to be confirmed how many homes are going to be on that site. Stakeholder analysis is still being done and the baseline survey is still being examined. This is a matter for the city council rather than the LDA, but on Springvale, where 178 homes are planned for Chapelizod, planning permission was received for a rapid-build project in 2018, That site is still not occupied. We also have CIÉ in 2021, which published a master plan for 1,000 homes at Heuston Station. The application was meant to go in at the end of the year. This will not be happening until 2025.

I appreciate that work is being done and that agencies such as the LDA have been capitalised by the Government. The money is there, but the agencies in question are still simply not moving when it comes to the delivery of homes, turning the sod on projects and putting people in there. We need to have more affordable cost-rental homes on State land. I suggest that we then allow people to supplement that with the housing assistant payment, HAP, to make up the difference between what local authorities are not delivering when it comes to pure social housing and what is actually delivered in the context of affordable cost-rental homes.

The level of homelessness continues to increase. The one thing we know from homelessness is that people are stuck on housing lists that are simply not moving and are coming from the private rental sector. Again, I appreciate what the Government has done with the tenant in situscheme. That was a Dublin City Council initiative. Senator Fitzpatrick and Deputy McAuliffe went to the Government with the scheme and the Government ran with it.

We need to remove the proposed sale of a property as a ground for eviction. This is standard in many European countries, where if one pays one's rent, one is entitled to a secure place to live. Our rental sector is typified by insecurity. Unfortunately, for Senator McDowell, his rights to a second home and to an investment property simply should not be the same as somebody who was living in a house and had a roof over their head. That is something we need to deal with and with which the whole political system needs to grapple. We need to change how we look at our residential and rental sectors.

I wish to finish by commenting on a matter of concern to me. An application was made for office accommodation on Baggot Street, which is fine. That application was turned down. We have sluggish growth in the office and residential sector. One of the grounds which the local authority seems to have given as a reason for refusing this application was that it would devalue properties adjacent to it. I want to see devaluation of all properties because it is simply too expensive for people to live in them. That is not what we should be looking at. For such a reason to be a planning ground for a local authority means that one is giving a charter to NIMBYism whereby people say that their properties will be devalued if anything is built beside them. We very much need to write to local authorities to say that that is not a legitimate planning ground for rejection. I do not mind the rejection of projects to construct office buildings on that ground, but I do not believe that such a ground should apply to residential accommodation.