Richard Boyd Barrett
Question:1. Deputy Richard Boyd Barrett asked the Taoiseach if he will report on the work of the economic division of his Department. [21101/18]
View answerWednesday, 23 May 2018
Questions (1, 2)
Mary Lou McDonald
Question:2. Deputy Mary Lou McDonald asked the Taoiseach if he will report on the work of the economic division of his Department. [22243/18]
View answerOral answers (12 contributions)
I propose to take Questions Nos. 1 and 2 together.
The economic division in my Department supports me and the Government in developing and implementing policy to deliver sustainable and regionally balanced economic growth and quality jobs, and to promote effective planning and delivery of infrastructural developments, including housing. The Cabinet committees and senior officials groups, supported by the division, help to deliver and implement policies in these areas. Cabinet Committee A deals with issues relating to the economy, jobs, the labour market, competitiveness, the digital economy, trade, the action plan on rural development and pensions. It last met on 18 January and will next meet on 11 June.
Cabinet Committee D covers infrastructure investment and delivery, housing and climate action and provides political oversight in relation to Project Ireland 2040. The committee last met on 1 February and its next meeting is not yet scheduled. The division also monitors implementation of the Action Plan for Jobs, leads Ireland's participation in the annual European semester process and prepares the annual national risk assessment which provides an opportunity to identify and consider potential economic risks and challenges on a structured basis. The draft of this was approved at Cabinet on Tuesday and will now go out to consultation over the next four-month period. Cabinet Committee D is also responsible for liaison with the Central Statistics Office, CSO. It co-ordinated the recent completion and publication of the national policy statement on the bioeconomy and works with the EU division of my Department on the possible economic impacts of Brexit.
A unit within the economic division also supports the Minister of State with responsibility for data protection, Deputy Pat Breen, and contributes to a whole-of-Government approach to the challenges and opportunities arising from the increased digitisation of modern life. The division is also leading work that recently commenced on a framework for a new national digital strategy. The division also provides me with briefing and speech material on economic and related policy issues. Given its role, the division works closely with colleagues in the Departments of Finance and Public Expenditure and Reform, and in other Departments, which have lead responsibility in specific policy areas.
I ask Deputies to stick to the allocated time. I call Deputy Richard Boyd Barrett.
It seems indisputable that the biggest social and economic crisis facing this country is the housing crisis and the lack of social housing and affordable housing. I was at the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government this morning where departmental officials gave us the latest figures. They show that there are 86,000 families on the housing list. It is, however, much larger. We were also told that there were 36,000 people on housing assistance payments, HAP, schemes and 22,000 on rental accommodation, RAS, schemes. In reality, that means we have 144,000 households on the housing list.
Given the rental spiral happening and the extraordinary difficulty in many parts of the country of getting private landlords and the private sector to deliver HAP tenancies - in many cases they are pulling out of those tenancies - is there any recognition that HAP is just an accident waiting to happen? The reliance that the Government is putting on it in Rebuilding Ireland is an accident waiting to happen. As a supplement to that, even if it was delivered, does the Taoiseach have any estimate of how much it would cost? I refer to the target of outsourcing to the private sector about 83,000 of the planned 133,000 social housing units. I do not believe that they can be delivered under HAP and RAS. However, even if they were, is there any estimate of how much that would cost on an ongoing basis? Dr. Rory Hearne and Dr. Mary Murphy have estimated that it would cost us €23 billion over 30 years. That would be a massive drain on the public purse and that money would be far better spent investing in council housing rather than it leeching out in billions to the private sector.
If Deputies insist on asking protracted questions, we will not have time to get answers. I am however, in the Deputies' hands. I call Deputy Martin Kenny.
Deputy Mary Lou McDonald had to leave and she asked me to take these questions. Deputy McDonald has met many times with the various chambers around the country. Many trends arise in many places. It is the same, for instance, in the south east as in the north west. There is an absence of ensuring basic necessary infrastructure projects. Rosslare Port is one and the western rail corridor in my area is another. It has been left out. Most sensible people looking at the issue of the broader need for economic development consider that it is largely about our infrastructure and what infrastructure needs to be put in place. I refer to transport infrastructure in particular.
The issue of Brexit means that ports where we can directly export goods from our island to other European Union countries - rather than having to go through Britain - may be very important in future. Project Ireland 2040 plan has a huge absence in doing anything on that. I ask the Taoiseach to address this and to let me know exactly what the Government intends to do. I refer in particular to the western rail corridor. It runs from Sligo all the way down the west coast and goes right out to Rosslare Port. It would be a perfect access for goods and would regenerate an entire section of the country which has the most potential for economic development.
Where stands the rainy day fund? In economic terms the amount involved is ridiculous. It is €500 million. We have a housing crisis and €500 million might go to address something like housing for older people. That would produce a rate of return as opposed to investing this €500 million somewhere around the world in whatever the National Asset Management Agency, NAMA, comes up with to invest in. Any impact of this amount on the Government's finances is trivial. It a completely phony arrangement designed to shore up the Government's economic credentials. I do not understand the logic of it.
When is the fiscal space going to be determined? It is €1.8 billion for new measures, excluding demographic pressures and public pay costs. The precommitted expenditure is €2.6 billion. When will the amount of fiscal space be officially confirmed? The Taoiseach also noted people doing various economic things in his Department. How many economists are employed in his Department?
I think 25 people work in the economic division of the Taoiseach's Department. It is also responsible for statistics and supporting the Cabinet and Cabinet committees in respect of housing. Is the Taoiseach happy to stand over his claim that he made at the Fine Gael Ard-Fheis last year that the Government had a plan and the plan was working in respect of housing? On housing statistics, I asked the Taoiseach last week to give an assurance that 100% comparability would be maintained between current and previous homelessness statistics. I also asked that he would not allow a situation where future statistics excluded groups that were previously included. It is fine if he wants to publish a new set of statistics. Denying people the ability to compare like with like is, however, not okay. This concern is obvious because the deterioration in the situation in the past two years is shocking.
Overall homelessness is up 85%, with child homelessness increasing by an unprecedented 125%. In health, the past seven years have been spent meddling with figures in an attempt to cover up lengthening waiting lists and underestimates of costs. The same behaviour cannot be tolerated when it comes to homelessness. As the Department of the Taoiseach is in charge of official statistics, will the Taoiseach assure Members that full comparability in housing and homelessness statistics will be maintained?
When it comes to our economic and social policies more generally, the Government really works under six main principles. The first is managing our public finances prudently, having got into a situation where the budget is balanced and running surpluses on occasion, and paying down the national debt.
The second principle is full employment and we will reach our targets in that regard that quite soon. We are expecting that figures in June will indicate that more people in Ireland are at work than ever before. We also want to make sure that employment is quality employment that pays well, gives people a degree of security, is family friendly and provides pensions. Auto-enrolment is a part of that plan.
The third principle is raising living standards. Living standards in Ireland are rising, deprivation and poverty are falling and income inequality is narrowing, which we know from the CSO statistics.
The fourth principle is investment in infrastructure, housing and healthcare, with a focus on transport. Next year there will be a 25% increase in our infrastructure budget compared with this year. We have set out how we will spend €116 billion on public infrastructure over ten years.
The fifth principle is the reform of public services. We have now reversed the cuts in terms of spending. Education and health spending are at an all-time high. We now need to make sure that those additional, record resources actually result in good outcomes and good results for taxpayers, students and patients.
The sixth principle is the idea of Global Ireland and doubling our global footprint. We will produce a detailed plan on that in the next couple of weeks.
Everyone acknowledges that we have a housing shortage in Ireland, and we are all aware of how that happened. There was a seven-year period during which the Government could not afford to build social housing, the banks could not finance the construction of housing and the construction sector was on its knees. Virtually no houses were built in the country during that time and we now have a deficit of approximately 250,000 units, in terms of additional houses and apartments that need to be built. We added 7,000 houses to the social housing stock in a number of different ways, including purchases from developers, direct builds by councils and direct builds by approved housing bodies. That is the biggest increase in our social housing stock for many years. Having added 7,000 houses to our social housing stock next year, we plan to increase that to 10,000 or 11,000 a year, which the amount of social housing we need. We have to build up to that number; they cannot all be built at once.
The conversation around housing should not revolve around social housing entirely. We need to bear in mind that the vast majority of people do not qualify for and do not want social housing but rather want to buy their own homes and to save for that. However, there is a need to provide homes for that purpose which are affordable. In my constituency house building is really taking off again. As 18,000 new homes commenced construction in the past year, we are a little bit short of what is required to get to equilibrium, which is approximately 25,000. We believe we will get to that number next year and it will rise again to 35,000 the year after. The plan is working but it is working slowly, which is an inevitability, unfortunately. Housing construction cannot be ramped up as quickly as we would like, given that it reached such a nadir as a consequence of the financial crisis.
I am aware that there is a very active debate on homelessness statistics. Deputies Eoghan Murphy and Eoin Ó Broin are debating the issue all the time. I am not particularly interested in getting involved in that debate. Both figures, 9,000 or 10,000 people, in emergency accommodation represent too many people; there are many more than there used to be and I am not going to pretend otherwise. It is important that we focus on solutions and do not argue over categories and subcategories but if others want to have that debate, they are welcome to have it.
The Minister started the argument.
Spokespeople are also creating plenty of argument. It misses the point, quite frankly. We have asked the CSO to do some work on tracking accurately the number of new homes being built, because that is unclear at the moment. Some people base their figures on ESB connections, which is fairly accurate because it includes new homes and homes that have been off the grid for two years, which is as good as a new home. However, as it can also include things such as outhouses on farms, it is not a perfect statistic, even though it is a good one. Some people use BER certifications, which is also not perfect because one-off housing regularly does not require BER. We have asked the CSO to come up with a reliable set of figures it can stand over when it comes to new home building and we expect it to report on that in the next few months. As for homelessness, we have not asked the CSO to do that but it is a possibility that we could ask that the current figures be suspended and to ask the CSO to produce something more accurate that everyone can stand over. I do not believe anyone disputes statistics produced by the CSO. Statistics from Departments may be disputed, and people rightly dispute those that come from interest groups such as NGOs and others, but nobody disputes the figures from the CSO. It is probably the best organisation to provide these numbers.
Deputy Martin Kenny asked about investment in ports. If one looks at Project Ireland 2040, investment in our ports is specifically mentioned. Our ports are commercial entities, even though they are State-owned. The details are provided on port expansion plans for Dublin, Cork and Shannon-Foynes.
I asked about Rosslare.
Rosslare currently has no development plan in place. We contacted the owner, Irish Rail, specifically to ask if there were any plans to upgrade that port, and unfortunately there are none. We may need to work on that. The fact that it is owned and controlled by Irish Rail is a difficulty because Irish Rail tends to see it as a port that generates revenue for that company, rather than a port that could generate revenue that could then be re-invested in the port itself. The fact that it is part of CIÉ and Irish Rail is not ideal but that remains the position at present.