Deputy Jim Higgins gave me notice of his intention to raise on the Adjournment the subject matter of the need for the extension of the date for house improvement grants. Deputy Higgins' question is in order. He has ten minutes.
Adjournment Debate. - House Improvement Grants.
Let me seek clarification as to whether the Minister for Finance is taking the reply in relation to the house improvement grants.
The Minister for the Environment is engaged.
Let me also seek the permission of the House and your permission, Sir, to share time with my colleague, Deputy John Browne.
Is that agreed? Agreed.
What I am about to say dovetails neatly into what the Labour Leader, Deputy Spring, has just said, and it is conceded by the Government, that it is only a relatively minor concession but it will at least go some way towards alleviating problems that have arisen as a result of the inclement weather. What I am going to say is obvious, self-evident and reasonable and I earnestly hope the Government will accede to my request.
When the Minister for the Environment abolished the house improvement grants scheme after taking office in 1987, there was general dismay which arose first by virtue of the fact that it was recognised on all sides as being an enormously successful scheme. It had made possible the refurbishment of many houses which had gone in some cases almost beyond redemption. It brought back on to the housing stock houses which were semi-derelict. In addition, it saved the Exchequer finance, in the short term costing it finance, in the long-term saving it finance because by bringing these houses back to a state of reasonable repair in the long term the Exchequer was saved the cost of building local authority houses with all the long procedural wrangling, the red tape and bureaucracy involved in acquiring sites, legal costs on transfer, setting houses out to tender etc. It was generally acknowledged as being good.
Furthermore, the scheme gave employment to people throughout the length and breadth of Ireland. It encouraged people to register because unless they registered they were not eligible to draw grants. Therefore, small-time contractors came out of the woodwork; people involved in the black economy registered in the legitimate expectation that the scheme was going to stay in place. Unfortunately, the plumbers, blocklayers and plasterers who were brought out into the legitimate, open economy by this measure are tonight in Melbourne, Manchester and Massachusetts.
There was dismay also because a categorical assurance was given on several occasions in this House by the Minister that a guillotine would not be applied in relation to the terminal date for completion of the work. There was a legitimate expectation, again harboured and encouraged by the Minister that people would be given adequate time and certainly there would be no arbitrary concluding date. In fact, the Minister sometime during the summer decided he was going to bring down the guillotine on the scheme and he gave three months to people to complete the work. As a result of representations made by this side of the House and our partners in Opposition, the Minister relented and finally agreed to extend the closure date for the completion of the work to 31 May. There was general acceptance that this was a reasonable provision. After all, it gave people eight months in which to conclude the work.
What happened in the meantime could not have been foreseen. We have had, as is acknowledged statistically, three of the worst months in terms of weather conditions that this country has ever seen. We have had winds, storm, rain, floods and, as a result, it has been impossible to do the bulk of the work involved in those schemes. Consider that in quite a number of cases the pre-1940 grant scheme entitled a person up to £8,400. In a number of the cases we are talking about restoring roofs, repairing doors and windows, plastering and painting. No reasonable person could legitimately expect anybody to go up on a roof between 1 December and the end of last weekend and, as Deputy Spring has said, unfortunately the prognosis is not good for the future.
We are asking that the Minister extend the date by another three months, until 31 August, to enable this work to be completed. Unfortunately, taking the terms of reference of the scheme as they apply at present, if one has nine-tenths or 99 per cent of the work done but has not the entire scheme finished and notification sent to the Department of the Environment by 31 May, then one loses everything, all. We are asking the Minister to allay people's fears now, to do the decent, reasonable, honourable and the intelligent thing, that is announce forthwith that he is prepared to extend the date by a further three months to ensure that people can maximise the work to be done in the summer period. If he then wants to bring the guillotine down on the scheme, so be it. We ask the Minister, on behalf of the thousands of people who will not qualify otherwise and who cannot be expected to do the work within a reasonable time, to take the matter to Cabinet, make a decision, make the announcement now and in doing so he will have the gratitude and thanks of all involved.
(Carlow-Kilkenny): At the outset I must admit I am glad it is the Minister for Finance who is sitting opposite because I was worried about sharing time with two Mayo men. Only a Corkman would be brave enough to take on Mayo men.
I want to repeat more briefly what my colleague has said. I can add to the account of the storms by describing these floods and I am an expert on flooded houses at this stage. I can see the difficulty of taking on jobs in houses that have been flooded. How could you plaster damp walls? I do not know how long it will take for those houses to dry out, but I would not like to be doing a job in houses that had been flooded with three or four feet of water. The number of jobs to be done in houses that have been flooded will be small as a percentage of the total number of jobs that have to be done, but nevertheless they will come into that category.
As a result of the storms, people who have to replace bad windows will be very slow to give the builder the go-ahead to do the job. I think we would have an Irish Mary Poppins all over the place if some of the storms blew up again. The decision was made in the past few months to extend the completion date but we have now found that two months have had to be written off as no sensible person could have carried out work during the bad weather. Some people were caught out. They had started work on roof extensions and they had to stand by and see everything blown around the place and parts of the inside of the house becoming wet. If there were grounds for extending the date to May I think it is reasonable to give a further extension. In the long run it will cost the same money: the scheme will not be open to new people, we are allowing people to complete the work in better conditions, the house will be drier and the timber will be drier. I do not think we are so super-efficient that somebody would get a stroke if things were not finished exactly as planned. It is not part of our characteristics to do everything on time and that holds for the Department as well.
I do not see this as an area of conflict. It is not a question of the Government backing down but being reasonable in dealing with the exceptional circumstances that have arisen. I think the Government were quite reasonable in extending the time from November to May and it would be equally reasonable to extend the date to make up for the definite time loss. It is not as if people are coming up with a Mickey Mouse story that they had not time to complete the work on the house because somebody came home from America and they had to go out every night. It is recognised not only in the Dáil but right across the country that people could not do the work.
I ask the Minister not to give the official answer that the scheme has been extended before and could not now be extended again. I have a funny feeling, as I saw the Minister smiling some time ago, that he will tell Deputies to sit down and have sense as they cannot keep extending the scheme. I think the Minister will establish his name once more as a potential leader of a great party if he could accede to our request.
I could not hear the last comment from Carlow. I am deputising for my colleague, the Minister for the Environment who is in the Hague representing Ireland at the International Environment Conference.
No better man.
I welcome the opportunity afforded to me by this debate to put on record again, if that is necessary, the circumstances surrounding the termination of the 1985 house improvement grants scheme and the subsequent decision to set a deadline for the completion of approved works and the lodging of claims for payment.
I do not know if I have to direct these Deputies opposite back to what actually happened when this grant was introduced back in 1985 and the situation in which we found ourselves when we came into Government in 1987. We found at that stage that approvals for grants stood at £230 million. Deputy Higgins has said it would be the decent thing, the honourable thing and the credible thing to have provided a little money for the payment of those grants and then we would have no problems.
(Carlow-Kilkenny): What happened in 1982 when we were in Government?
A line had to be drawn, the scheme was proceeding headlong but there were no provisions made for it, except——
In 1982 the grants were all paid out within six weeks.
Let us hear the Minister without interruption.
Something had to be done. We drew the line and said there would be no more approvals. We had to come to grips with the amount of money involved. A number of people would not have been paid if the scheme had continued the way it was. We did not put a deadline on the scheme and we let it carry on. I do not think anybody could say that we were unreasonable. We specified a date of November last year for the completion of works. We have heard all the stories before that small builders had a large amount of work outstanding which they could not possibly get done within the time limit and my colleague, the generous-hearted man that he is, extended the completion date to May of this year. We are now only in the early days of March and there is a lot of time left between now and May.
I recognise that there have been problems over the past two months and that time has been lost but I do not think anybody could accuse us of being unreasonable when one considers that some people have had their approval in their hands for four-and-a-half years. Is it credible to allow this to go on and on and provide money for people when you do not know if they intend to do the work. I would have thought it very reasonable and accommodating that people who have approval to do the job should have been able to have it started in four-and-a-half years if they ever intended to do it. Even with all of the excuses in the world I would have thought that you would have got as far as that. People have had approvals for any time between three years and two months and four-and-a-half years. I take it that the pleas of the Deputies opposite are in good faith, that there may well be people with problems, but are Deputies suggesting seriously that the work will not be completed by May of this year, although this is only the beginning of March?
(Carlow-Kilkenny): Some people have not even started on the work.
Despite the fact that they have had approval for three or four years. Do they intend to start at all?
If the Minister were doing clinics he would find out.
I hold clinics and I can tell Deputies that before it was extended the last time I had four applicants from County Longford asking for an extension but I have not had any since. I would have thought — I know there were bad floods around Ballinrobe and that there were 12 feet of water in parts, but Longford-Westmeath suffered as badly as any other constituency and I have not had this mad rush at my clinics. In fact I was there last week-end to listen to problems, in case Deputies think I was not. There is still three months to go, March, April and May and you can do a lot of work in three months. However if Deputies have evidence that there are serious problems, I will mention that to my colleague.
We have been most accommodating to people with problems. We have spent £180 million on the scheme and we have paid out over 100,000 grants, but somebody sometime has to draw the shutter down and I do not think it is unreasonable that it should come down in May. If there are serious problems in some areas Deputies should put them to my colleague, who can consider them.
The Dáil adjourned at 11 p.m. until 10.30 a.m. on Wednesday, 7 March 1990.