(Cavan-Monaghan): This Bill gives legal effect to the 25 per cent remission of rates granted by the National Coalition Government for the year 1977 in respect of private houses. It also gives effect to the proposal of the present Government to derate private houses, certain types of community halls, secondary schools and ancillary buildings and farm buildings which were erected before 1959. It also purports to contain effective machinery which the Minister says will pass on the relief of tenanted private residential accommodation to the tenants. It also contains machinery which will enable the Minister to limit the estimates and expenditure of local authorities in any given year. Those are broadly the purported objects of the Bill.
Before we adjourned I had dealt for some time with the Bill in so far as it purports to pass on the rate of relief granted by the Bill to tenants of dwellings. I said then, and I want to repeat it now, that in my opinion the machinery in the Bill for passing on this relief is entirely inadequate, ineffective, unworkable and will not ensure that the tenant gets the benefit of the rates relief granted. That is very important. Flat dwellers in Dublin city and throughout the country and tenants of private houses have many complaints to make in regard to their tenancies and to their rights as tenants.
Because I do not think I would be in order in seeking to extend the scope of the discussion by referring to the whole area of landlord and tenant law, I propose to deal with only one of those complaints, I wish to direct my remarks to the fact that the Bill does not contain effective machinery for passing on the rate relief to tenants of flats and other private rented accommodation both in the city and throughout the country. That is a fatal defect of the Bill. The Fianna Fáil manifesto which has now become a book of reference in the House pledged Fianna Fáil to ensuring that tenants would be relieved of the rate content of their rent. This Bill does not do that. Indeed, it would be very difficult to put such relief into effect but obviously this is another example of a manifesto that was put together with an eye to getting votes in the last general election rather than to doing the job it purported to set out to do.
In this State there are about 300,000 tenants of rented accommodation, taking entire dwelling-houses and flats. According to the best estimate I can get the cost to the taxpayer of derating those dwellings in the current year is £8.5 million. In other words, whether by borrowing or by way of taxation, the taxpayer will have to find that amount and in the event of borrowing the debt would have to be serviced. Such estimates as I can get would indicate so far that the relief in respect of rates has not been passed on to the tenants for whom it was intended. This means that the best part of £8 million will be added this year to the income of landlords rather than making rented accommodation cheaper for tenants. The provision in this regard is not workable because all a landlord need do to find a way round the legislation is to terminate a tenancy and fix a new rent. I concede that such a move would not work where a flat or a dwelling-house was a controlled dwelling but the figures I have indicate that only about 5 per cent of rented dwellings are controlled dwellings. If I am wrong on any of these counts I am sure the Minister will contradict me when he is replying but so far as I can ascertain the landlord can find a way of charging whatever rent he can negotiate with a tenant.
According to the information I have, and which I have no reason to doubt, at least 80 per cent of flats are let on a weekly basis and practically all of them are the subject of a weekly or a monthly rent. In these circumstances there is nothing to prevent a landlord terminating a tenancy and demanding a new rent and there is nothing whatever that will protect the tenancy being created from now on. I refer to the situation in Dublin city although a similar situation prevails in every provincial town in the country.
