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Cabinet Committees

Dáil Éireann Debate, Wednesday - 4 May 2022

Wednesday, 4 May 2022

Questions (16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22)

Mary Lou McDonald

Question:

16. Deputy Mary Lou McDonald asked the Taoiseach when the Cabinet committee on housing will next meet. [17581/22]

View answer

Richard Boyd Barrett

Question:

17. Deputy Richard Boyd Barrett asked the Taoiseach when the Cabinet committee on housing will next meet. [18412/22]

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Cian O'Callaghan

Question:

18. Deputy Cian O'Callaghan asked the Taoiseach when the Cabinet committee on housing will next meet. [20037/22]

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Ruairí Ó Murchú

Question:

19. Deputy Ruairí Ó Murchú asked the Taoiseach when the Cabinet committee on housing will next meet. [20081/22]

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Paul McAuliffe

Question:

20. Deputy Paul McAuliffe asked the Taoiseach when the Cabinet committee on housing will next meet. [20347/22]

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Jennifer Murnane O'Connor

Question:

21. Deputy Jennifer Murnane O'Connor asked the Taoiseach when the Cabinet committee on housing will next meet. [20348/22]

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Paul Murphy

Question:

22. Deputy Paul Murphy asked the Taoiseach when the Cabinet committee on housing will next meet. [20606/22]

View answer

Oral answers (11 contributions)

I propose to take questions Nos. 16 to 22, inclusive, together.

The Cabinet committee on housing has met three times to date in 2022. The most recent meeting took place on Monday, 4 April, and the next is planned for Thursday, 12 May. This committee oversees the implementation of Housing for All and the delivery of programme for Government commitments regarding housing and related matters. Housing for All is the most ambitious housing plan in the history of our State, backed by the highest ever level of investment with more than €4 billion in annual guaranteed State investment in housing over the coming years. The plan contains a range of actions and measures to ensure more than 300,000 new homes are built by 2030. This figure includes 90,000 social homes, 36,000 affordable purchase homes and 18,000 cost-rental homes.

On 7 April, the Government published the third quarterly progress report under Housing for All. It shows strong progress towards the fundamental reform of the housing system, setting the course to significantly increase the supply of housing and provide a sustainable housing system into the future. Of 213 actions in Housing for All, a total of 135 have either been completed already or are being delivered on an ongoing basis. Data from the Central Statistics Office, CSO, shows that despite the disruption caused by Covid-19, a total of 20,433 new dwellings were completed in 2021. Some 5,669 homes were completed during the first quarter of this year, representing the highest number of quarterly home completions in the State for many years. In particular, there is a significant pick-up in apartment development. There is also a strong pipeline indicated for 2022, with more than 34,000 commencements in the 12 months to March 2022. This data shows that our Housing for All strategy is working in its focus to provide sustainable homes for people in the right places and we are confident that the target for delivery of 24,600 homes in 2022 will be met.

The plan also contains measures aimed at addressing capacity issues in the construction industry, promoting viability and driving down the cost of construction over time. Under the plan, Government has also implemented a number of measures to make homes more affordable to buy or to rent. We are also continuing to support our most vulnerable, namely, those experiencing homelessness and who have more complex housing needs. The situation arising in Ukraine and our commitment to house those fleeing the war makes the delivery of Housing for All more important than ever. It also raises challenges such as inflationary pressures and supply chain issues, which will need careful monitoring to ensure we stay on track to deliver targeted housing supply. The Cabinet committee will maintain focus on this delivery.

The facts on the ground paint a very different picture from the one the Taoiseach has painted. Let us take his city of Cork. Since he became Taoiseach, rents have increased by 15% to €1,400 per month. Average house prices in Cork have increased 20% under his tenure to €320,000. Homelessness is up an astonishing 26%, which is the highest it has ever been and higher than the high point of September 2019. Social housing need is approximately 7,000 households yet the Government's housing plan will only meet approximately 45% of that through to 2026. The latest affordable housing figures just agreed with Cork City Council are going to provide just 75 affordable homes to purchase per year in the Taoiseach's city for the lifetime of this Government.

The Taoiseach's legacy will be the highest house prices and rents in the history of the State, a shrinking private rental sector, high homelessness levels and a failure to meet social and affordable housing need, and that was before we had the Ukrainian refugee crisis. I urge him to put aside the misleading briefings that he is being given, reflect on the failure of his housing plan and put in place a new housing plan that means no person or family is left behind.

The Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage made very reckless, irresponsible and somewhat bizarre comments on the rising homelessness situation at the weekend when he suggested that it was to do with the number of European Economic Area, EEA, and non-economic area refugees - which, by the way, is everybody in the world - coming into the country, but not Ukrainians. I find this a bizarre statement for him to make. This seems like reckless deflection but with a potentially dangerous subtext, which some on the far right, worryingly, have already tried to pick up on. The Minister needs to be completely disabused of his notions. The reason the homelessness figures are going through the roof is because we had an eviction ban and a rent increase ban that were effective during Covid-19. Then, the Government removed those things, and the situation has gotten worse since then. The vast majority of people - and they are the ones coming into my clinic week in, week out - who end up in homeless services do so because they are evicted by landlords on grounds of sale when they have done absolutely nothing wrong, or because rents are absolutely astronomical and they cannot afford them, and the housing assistance payment, HAP, limits will not reach to those levels. I appeal to the Taoiseach and the Minister not to engage in dangerous deflection tactics and admit that they need to bring in things like an eviction ban to prevent evictions and control rents to make them affordable.

I thank the Deputy. I suggest that Deputies please limit their contributions to one minute to allow the Taoiseach to respond.

I agree with the comments to the effect that there is no place for reckless scapegoating and deflection. New rents have increased by 9% over the last 12 months. Homelessness has increased by 22% in the same period. House prices are about to reach record levels, surpassing their Celtic tiger peaks. Analysis by Dr. Lorcan Sirr and Mr. Mel Reynolds shows that the number of new homes available to individual buyers last year fell to just 5,698, the lowest number in several years.

Home ownership levels are in freefall under the Government. We desperately need more homes that are affordable; instead, build-to-rent is dominating the supply of new housing, especially in Dublin. A total of 82% of all residential schemes that went for planning or got planning permission in 2020 in Dublin city were build-to-rent schemes. Despite this, the Planning Regulator has told Dublin City Council it must drop its plans to curtail build-to-rent because it conflicts with national policy.

Is it now national policy to allow build-to-rent to dominate the supply of housing? What is the Government doing to enable local authorities to curtail the dominance of build-to-rent?

To follow up on what I raised on Questions on Policy or Legislation, the issue of the housing assistance payment, HAP, scheme not allowing for payment plans needs to be brought to the Minister and his Department and rectified. Otherwise, people are going to be put in incredibly difficult circumstances, having to make an instant repayment of arrears. Between that and the fact they will be facing homelessness, we are making a bad situation worse.

Along with that, will the Taoiseach update us on the issue of dealing with vacant properties from the point of view of it being one of the solutions to the housing issue? Where do things stand in respect of an audit of State land to determine what is suitable for building on?

I raise the issue of housing adaptation grants and the discretion of local authorities to sort out issues. It is Government policy to keep people in their homes as long as possible. I am working with a 103-year-old lady, who has an excellent family. She had some minor work done in the past two years to have her home’s roof and heating fixed, and she came to me a few weeks ago about getting her windows and doors refitted because of the cost of heating and her age. The council has told me it will not carry out any more works, but I have told the council this lady is 103 years old. If she had been living in a nursing home in recent years, it would have cost thousands of euro, and keeping people in their homes is part of our Government policy. I ask that discretion is given to local authorities. It is the same with housing adaptation grants in respect of children with disabilities, including autism. Again, there is no discretion there and this has become one of the biggest issues I have faced in recent months.

The other issue I raise relates to modular builds, which the Taoiseach and the Minister have spoken about. Will the Taoiseach update us on it? Many of these builds can be completed within 11 days and it is important we get them done as quickly as possible.

Reliable sources working in homelessness services in Cork city tell me a significant influx of people from Cork county is currently in search of emergency accommodation. Bed and breakfast operators that previously catered for people are providing less and less accommodation, seemingly for two reasons. The first is that as we move towards the summer season, these operators are deciding to prioritise tourism and, second, an increasing number of bed and breakfast providers are being booked by the International Protection Accommodation Services, IPAS, to accommodate refugees from Ukraine. The State must stop pitting refugees against other homeless people. Solutions need to be provided that will benefit the victims both of the housing crisis and of Putin's war. Will the Taoiseach please look into the local issue I have raised and take steps to ensure this problem is resolved?

I disagree with the assessment made by Deputy Ó Broin regarding housing policy, and I have not seen from him or his party a substantive policy response to Housing for All. It just does not exist. Housing for All is a very comprehensive and substantive document, with a suite of measures that will take time. There is no doubt Covid-19 has been a key factor over the past two years, which the Deputy ignored for obvious reasons. Construction was closed twice, in 2020 and 2021, for three or four months each year, which slowed construction, but it has rebounded quite well. The issue is we need to build about 35,000 houses, between the private and public sectors, every year over the next ten years. The more we can accelerate, the better. It will mean all house types - social, affordable and all other types - will have to be facilitated to meet the needs that exist. I am very clear about that.

To me, the biggest challenge now is the war on Ukraine and the inflation that has emerged coming out of Covid, in terms of the imbalance of supply and demand, which has been exacerbated by the energy crisis caused by the Ukrainian war but also by the impact of inflation more generally and on commodities. As we all know, builders are now talking about much higher increases in the cost of materials for building. The cost of building any building, including homes, is increasing because of the cost of materials, and even tenders for State works are being received in much smaller volumes because of the concerns arising from the inflation that has occurred because of the war.

Notwithstanding that, a range of schemes have been introduced to increase and help affordability and to promote the building of cost-rental and affordable homes. Capacity and resources have been given to local authorities to build up their in-house resources to enable them to do much more, on both the affordable and the social housing fronts. There is no other way but to build more houses and have greater supply across the board. Given that the population continues to increase and has done so significantly in the past decade, that imperative of increasing supply still stands. We do not have the luxury as a country of trying to oppose various other schemes, types of buildings, mixes of developments on certain sites and so on. We just do not have that luxury because we urgently need a significant ramp-up and increase in the supply of houses across the board.

To respond to Deputy Boyd Barrett, multiple factors underpin the homelessness issue and it is not simple, nor as simple as the Deputy presented. I take on board what he said, but about six rental Acts have been brought in. One of the features of the rental situation has been the exodus of small landlords, with one or two houses, from the market. It is a market the Deputy and others say is very lucrative, yet many landlords have left it in the past two to three years. That is a challenge.

Deputy Barry referenced that some people are using their properties, whether bed and breakfast accommodation or whatever, for other purposes, all of which takes from the housing market. My point about the smaller landlords issue is that we must balance all measures to ensure we continue to get supply into the market, both for rent and for house-building. That is the key. Furthermore, we have to have private sector investment as well as public sector investment. Public sector investment is being provided for, with €4 billion a year being provided by the State through various means for house construction. In addition to that, we will need up to €5 billion or €6 billion from the private sector to get the level of house construction we require. That is why I referenced build-to-rent, for example, and other issues. The primary focus of the Government is social housing and affordable housing, and to get as much private sector development as possible on top of that in order that we will get a broad mix.

Deputy Ó Murchú raised the HAP issue. As I said in response to him earlier, we will talk to the authorities about that and the background to it.

On the housing adaptation grant, there is always some degree of discretion with local authorities and I will discuss that further with Deputy Murnane O'Connor. The modular builds will take much longer than 11 days, depending on quality and so on, but that has been initiated.

I think I have largely dealt with Deputy Barry's points. I do not accept his point about pitting refugees against those on the housing lists. We are not doing that at all. The vast bulk of Ukrainian displaced persons have been in hotels and various other forms of accommodation sourced by the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth and the Red Cross through the pledging situation.

Will the Taoiseach look into the issue that has arisen in Cork?

Is féidir teacht ar Cheisteanna Scríofa ar www.oireachtas.ie .
Written Answers are published on the Oireachtas website.
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