I move: "That the Bill be now read a Second Time."
The Housing (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill, 1985, the debate on which we are now opening is a wide-ranging and significant piece of housing legislation. I shall start by summarising briefly the main objectives of the Bill, these are,
—to establish a new statutory framework for the local authority housing programme so as to ensure that it caters adequately for the housing needs of particular categories of persons such as the homeless, travellers, the aged and so on;
—to give additional responsibilities for the housing of homeless persons to housing authorities and to increase their powers to enable them to meet these new responsibilities;
—to provide statutory backing for a number of schemes of grants and subsidies which were introduced in recent years including the mortgage subsidy scheme, the £5,000 grant scheme for persons surrendering local authority or Army accommodation to build or buy a private house, the scheme of assistance for the provision of housing by voluntary organisations and the reconstruction of defective low cost and other rented local authority houses;
—to make a number of other amendments to housing legislation and to other codes in matters relating to housing.
The Bill is, therefore, the most far-reaching housing measure brought forward since the Housing Act, 1966. That Act has served us well but it is inevitable that after almost 20 years a substantial recasting of its provisions should have become necessary in the light of the changes which have taken place in the housing situation. Happily the priority of our housing programme is no longer that of clearing extensive areas of unfit housing and relieving acute and widespread overcrowding. The primary concern and direction of housing policy must now be to ensure that categories of persons such as the homeless, the aged, the disabled, travellers and single parent families, etc. have access to housing suitable and adequate for their needs.
The emphasis placed by the Bill on the provision of housing for those in need is the most fundamental restatement of the objectives of housing policy since the Labourers (Ireland) Act, 1883, and the Housing of the Working Classes Act, 1890. The Housing Act, 1966, repealed more than 50 earlier Housing Acts and replaced the separate rural and urban housing codes based respectively on the Labourers and the Housing of Working Classes Acts, with a uniform housing code. However, it retained in many of its provisions the primary concern of the earlier housing codes namely the elimination of slums and overcrowding. Many of the provisions of the Act reflected this emphasis. I instance in particular sections 53, 55 and 60 imposing respectively duties on housing authorities to prepare estimates of housing needs, building programmes and schemes of letting priorities.
Section 8 of the Bill which replaces section 53 reflects the broader objectives of housing policy which have emerged in more recent years and which it is fair to say have, in many cases, been acknowledged in practice by local authorities in advance of any revised statutory provisions. Under section 8 a housing authority may, as they see fit, and shall if requested by the Minister, prepare an estimate of the existing and prospective housing requirements of their area. The authorities are required in making these estimates to have regard not only to housing conditins in their area but also to the number of persons living in temporary accommodation; expected changes in the size and structure of the population of the area and, to the extent they consider appropriate, the housing requirements of persons residing outside their functional area. These estimates relate to the overall housing requirements of an area and not solely the needs to be met by local authority housing. The provisions of section 8 of the Bill and the broader perspective it embraces are good illustrations of the wider horizons of housing policy in the new Bill.
I now propose, rather than considering the Bill on a section by section basis, which we shall be doing in any event on Committee Stage, to address in some detail the main impact of the Bill on the local authority housing system, in regard to the homeless, the voluntary housing movement and the travellers. I will then deal with the other significant provisions in the Bill more or less in the order that they occur in the Bill.
On local authority housing the provisions in the Bill relating to management and letting of local authority housing are designed to meet the commitment contained in paragraph 5.88 of the national plan and I quote:
The statutory provisions on the management and letting of local authority housing are being reviewed to ensure that the needs of particular categories of persons, such as the homeless, the aged, the disabled, travellers and single parent families will get due priority in the formulation of building programmes and the allocation of tenancies.
Successive Governments have committed enormous financial resources to the local authority housing programme over the years. It is necessary, therefore, for the Government to ensure as far as possible that these resources are used in an efficient and cost effective manner and they are distributed fairly having regard to the type and severity of the housing need in each local authority area.
Section 9 provides for an annual assessment of the housing needs in each area which are to be met by the housing authority. An important aspect of the new arrangements is that housing authorities will be required to notify certain other housing authorities, health boards and voluntary bodies providing accommodation, shelter or welfare of their intention to carry out the assessment. This will enable those bodies to bring to the attention of the authority persons, in particular homeless persons, who are in need of accommodation but who may not have applied to the local authority for housing.
In carrying out their annual assessments the authorities will be required specifically to have regard to the needs of the homeless, members of the travelling people, persons living in unfit or overcrowded accommodation, persons sharing involuntarily their accommodation, elderly or disabled persons or persons in need of housing for medical or compassionate reasons and also of persons who may be living in adequate accommodation but simply unable to reasonably meet the cost of that accommodation. These are the target categories of need which the local authority housing programme will address in future. Persons in these categories who reside outside the functional area of the authority may be included in the assessment. This latter provision meets the objectives of the Housing Act, 1984 which was enacted following a Supreme Court ruling to restore the power of local authorities to house persons from outside their functional area and allows the Housing Act, 1984 to be repealed.
The annual assessments of housing need are to be submitted to the Minister so that he has available to him the most up-to-date assessment of housing needs in each local authority-in advance of the determination of the annual capital allocation for the construction of local authority housing. This will help towards a fair and equitable distribution as between local authorities with due regard to the different categories of need, and its extent, in the different areas. In looking at the provisions of section 9, I would also direct the attention of Deputies to section 17 (1) which requires local authorities to reflect in their building programmes the range of needs and the different requirements of the various categories included in an assessment under section 9. Under section 17 (2) a county council shall be deemed to have and always to have had, power to provide dwellings and sites in a town commissioner's area; this provision is doing no more than putting on a definite footing what has in practice been happening for many years. Section 17 (3) enables a county council and town commissioners in their area to enter into an agreement that the county council will be responsible for the management and control of any or all of the town commissioners' houses. This power will be particularly useful where the reconstruction of town commissioners' houses under section 12, to which I shall be coming to later, is proposed.
Housing authorities will be required within one year of the commencement of section 11 to make new schemes to determine the priority to be afforded to persons in the letting of local authority dwellings. These new schemes will address the categories of housing need identified in the annual housing assessment under section 9. They will also provide that the housing authority may from time to time set aside a particular number or proportion of the houses becoming available for letting for particular categories of need and that priority shall be given to persons in those categories in the letting of the dwellings so set aside.
An important new provision of the schemes of letting priorities will be that where a housing authority have reason to believe that an applicant has deliberately depressed his housing conditions in order to improve his prospects of obtaining local authority housing, the authority may disregard the present housing conditions for the purposes of determining priority. The making or amending of a scheme of letting priorities or the setting aside of houses for particular categories of housing need are functions reserved to the elected members.
Section 12 provides for the scheme, announced in paragraph 5.91 of the national plan, of assistance to housing authorities for the reconstruction of "low cost" and other local authority dwellings which have suffered serious deterioration due to design or construction defects or because of their age. I am optimistic that this initiative on the part of the Government will have a major impact in helping housing authorities to overcome the problems of these estates and ensure that the houses continue to provide good accommodation. Houses on the estates concerned which have been sold by the authority may be reconstructed as part of a scheme to improve dwellings still owned by the authority. It is envisaged that this power will be used where it is necessary to achieve satisfactory rehabilitation of the estate as a whole. In such cases the owner of the house will be expected to meet half the cost of the works to his house. Loan charges subsidy will be provided to cover 80 per cent of the cost of the works to rented houses and 40 per cent in the case of houses which had been sold by the authority.
Where a housing authority reconstruct houses under section 12 they may also be required to carry out environmental and other improvement works to the estate. Section 19 will provide for greater flexibility in the ways that housing authorities may, with the approval of the Minister, use their housing capital receipts. I envisage that this provision will be used to assist housing authorities in meeting the cost of these environmental and other improvement works to local authority housing estates which are suffering from anti-social behaviour, vandalism and other community problems.
Section 24 amends the existing statutory provisions regarding local authority housing subsidy. In addition to the loan charge subsidies now in operation, and those for the reconstruction of houses under section 12, subsidy may also be paid in respect of the provision of hostels by local authorities, which could be of importance in the context of accommodating the homeless, and in respect of the provision of sites and ancillary facilities for travellers. I will refer again to these latter aspects.
While on the local authority housing programme I would like to refer to section 4 which deals with the £5,000 grant scheme announced by the Government in Building on Reality. The concept that a grant should be provided to assist better-off tenants of local authority dwellings to provide their own accommodation by building or purchasing a private house was an imaginative and, I am pleased to say, highly successful initiative. It has long been recognised that the financial circumstances of very many local authority tenants can improve considerably over time compared with their circumstances when they were first given a house by a local authority. The fact that over 175,000 dwellings provided by local authorities have been bought by tenant purchasers is testimony to this fact. However, the purchase of a rented dwelling by the tenant removes that house from the local authority stock whereas those availing of the £5,000 grant release a vacant dwelling for reletting to persons on the local authority waiting list.
This scheme has been very widely welcomed and has been even more successful than we had anticipated. In 1985, I expect that over 2,000 houses will be surrendered to local authorities under this scheme and I anticipate that the number in 1986 will be greater still. The combined effect of the high level of local authority house building pursued by the Government since we took office in 1982 and the dramatic impact of the £5,000 grant scheme has reduced significantly for the first time in many years the waiting lists and the pressure of demand for local authority housing.
