Because I have been tied up with the Special Committee on the Finance Bill, I regret I have not had the opportunity to listen to the contributions to this debate. This is a critically important issue for so many people in our society, and so many in my own constituency.
The Bill has been awaited for a very long time. An expectation has been built up that the Bill would make an appreciable contribution towards tackling the housing crisis. The only speaker I have had the opportunity to listen to was Deputy Callely. He certainly made the best of what is very poor material, and I want to reply to a number of the points he made.
Deputy Callely described the shared ownership scheme alternatively as a fantastic idea and a fabulous scheme but he then went on quite properly to show why it is almost of no relevance to the constituency he represents and the different constituency that I represent in urban Dublin. He dealt with the foolhardiness of a previous Government who left us with so many vacant houses in the mid-eighties that thousands of pounds of tax-payers' money had to be spent on security to protect these unoccupied dwellings. The Deputy is right, thousands of pounds were spent on the protection of vacant houses at that time and the vast majority of that money was spent in my constituency. If this anomaly is not addressed soon I predict it will result in an uprising a la Brixton, Toxteth or Los Angeles in my constituency where Dublin Corporation, for reasons of history, own the major part of public sector housing although it is a county council administrative area. In that constituency Dublin Corporation incurred the bill to which Deputy Callely refers. It was a scandal but it is important to point out the reason. What happened was that the then Coalition Government of Fine Gael and Labour introduced another fabulous idea which is known colloquially in my constituency as the £5,000 grant scheme. Of course, it was not really a £5,000 grant scheme, it was closer to a £10,000 grant scheme. In any event it had certain merits in certain geographic areas of the country but it was almost an unmitigated disaster for the local authority areas in my constituency and in Dublin generally. The reason was that in a relatively new constituency just as people are beginning to put down roots and community leadership was beginning to evolve, anyone who had a bit of get up and go and who was in employment got up and went. The result was a mass exodus at that time. People bought into low cost private housing as a result of assistance from the scheme in question. I had no objection to that scheme, it certainly had merits. Down the country, for example, it worked reasonably well from the point of view of my many constituents who availed of it and bought into the low cost private sector so it was successful and it was a good idea. Unfortunately, sadly and tragically some have had their homes repossessed since but generally speaking many did well as a result of that scheme and I would be the first to acknowledge that.
In terms of a constituency that has been planned so badly and which has such a vast homogenous belt of public sector housing and at a time when leadership was beginning to emerge and when people had put down roots they were encouraged to get up and go. The result was the situation to which Deputy Callely refers.
Dublin Corporation, at the best of times unable, in my constituency anyway, to co-ordinate a tenanting policy with casual vacancies arising, suddenly had a vast number of vacant houses. I recall bringing the matter to the attention of Dublin Corporation by way of motion. I took a photographer around to some of the vacant houses and in the motion I gave the estimate that the cost to the taxpayer would be of the order of £250,000. A gentleman who works for, I think, Dublin Corporation — in any case he works for the Dublin City Manager — Mr. Noel Carroll, a great friend of Gay Byrne, who has easy access to the Gay Byrne show, said I was talking rubbish. Subsequently it emerged that the cost to the taxpayer was £750,000 and that I had vastly underestimated the cost of restoring the units destroyed. That is the situation and that is what happens as a result of ad hoc planning of housing needs, introducing schemes off the top of the head, introducing schemes that take no account of the variants and the geographical factors and of the circumstances — as Deputy Callely said — that are unique and particular to urban areas and especially the greater Dublin urban area.
This Bill has been awaited with bated breath by the 30,000 housing applicants throughout the country as if it is to provide some badly needed relief. I am afraid it will make only a minimal contribution and will be a major disappointment to those people. In the local authority, of which I am a member, Dublin County Council, there are 2,117 people on the housing list. Some of these cases are desperate. Nobody in Dublin County Council area, to my recollection, has managed to be housed off the priority list during the past nine months or more. We have only managed to house people who have become homeless.
We talk about taxpayers' money being wasted on the security bill to protect houses but now taxpayers' money is devoted towards keeping people in bed and breakfast accommodation and in health board hostels. That is the reality and it is a cruel confidence trick on people who are in need of housing.
I should like to deal briefly with the question of the shared ownership scheme. I have heard only Deputy Callely on this as we have been dealing with the Committee Stage of the Finance Bill since Monday. That Deputy said that the shared ownership scheme will be a fabulous scheme, that it is the jewel in the crown of this legislation. As I have said, it is a cruel confidence trick because it is inoperable and it is wrong for any Member of this House to advise unsuspecting housing applicants to opt for such scheme. I should like to explain why that is the case by taking a particular example from my own constituency that is capable of being empirically applied. The facts are straightforward.
The idea is that the initial facility is there to purchase 50 per cent of the equity of the house, pay the rental at the same time, and during the 25 year period or, more literally at the end of it, there is an obligation to purchase the remaining 50 per cent of equity. What does all that mean for the people who queue week after week to come to my advice centres and to the advice centres of a great many Members of this House? The following are figures I have worked out to give advice in these circumstances, and I would be obliged if the Minister, when replying, would indicate if there is anything in them that is wrong or misleading. Take, for example, a typical house in my constituency of Dublin South West which is capable of being bought for £41,000 — there is a number of constituencies where one could not purchase a typical house for £41,000. Let us take it that 50 per cent of that price is funded by a deposit of £1,000 required for fees and so on, and by a mortgage of £19,500. The mortgage repayments on £20,500 at, say, 10.75 per cent interest is £199 per month, to the nearest penny. The rent on the remaining £20,500 at an escalator of approximately 5 per cent is £85 per month. That gives a total repayment, by the person who has been successfully approved under the scheme, of £284 per month. Having regard to the income group we are talking about here — and Deputy Callely made a very good point about that — £284 per month is a pretty hefty repayment.
If that were the end of the story it would not be too bad but it is not. At the end of 25 years that person must purchase the remaining 50 per cent equity which was £20,500, at an escalator of 4 per cent which is the kind of escalator that actuaries work on at present — it could be more or, in the context of the European exchange rate mechanism, it could be less. People out there who think that they have purchased their house for £284 per month over 25 years will find at the end of 25 years that it will cost them £52,500 to purchase the remaining 50 per cent of the equity. Can Members of this House in all conscience advise housing applicants who come to their clinics and advice centres to become involved in such an entanglement? How is it expected by the Government that the average low income earner, who may indeed have become unemployed by this time, who is nearing retirement age or is at retirement age, will find £52,500 to buy out the remaining equity? No bank will give a loan of £52,500 to somebody nearing retiring age, who may have become unemployed, who is certainly on a low income unless they won the lottery in the interim. How are they supposed to find that money?
I do not think the Government have seriously thought out this scheme at all. Is it any wonder that the uptake on the scheme is so marginal? Is it any wonder that it misses its target by a mile? Is it any wonder that when I raised this matter in the House on 19 December last not one single house in the greater Dublin area, where approximately one-third of the people live, had been purchased under the share ownership scheme? People are not fools at the end of the day, and it would be the height of folly to engage in such a scheme.
People do not understand that what we are talking about here is a double generation liability. There is no way that the average person on the necessary low income in their middle thirties or early forties could, 25 years hence and close to retirement age, take on a second mortgage. It must be presumed that they have offspring who, in turn, will have to get a very steep mortgage in order to, 25 years later, end up owning a very modest house.
I am not denouncing the concept of a shared ownership scheme. I am not denouncing the multifaceted approach to the housing crisis that is suggested in this Bill. I believe that all the different streams in it are necessary. I believe that the shared ownership concept may indeed have merit. However, as practically structured at the moment, it would be disingenuous — and I would not take the responsibility — to advise one of my constituents to embark upon such a scheme. It is high time the Government restructured it and had a look at this situation. When one has regard to the fact that that is such a major part of this scheme and it is so fatally flawed, people who are on the housing list will be tragically disappointed by the impact this Bill will have.
I will refer briefly to the situation in my own local authority where we have 2,117 people on the housing list. The number of people who could afford even to contemplate the folly of entering into the shared ownership scheme is but a fraction of those 2,117 applicants. Four hundred and ninety-five of them are employed or involved in a FÁS or SES scheme which, admittedly, is a very broad definition of being employed; 15 are on family maintenance; 1,585 are social welfare recipients and there have been no income details from 22. I honestly do not know what kind of world the Department of the Environment think we are living in or what kind of advice the Minister is getting. Is it that the Minister sets the political parameters and the advisers have no choice? I cannot believe that the advisers would not have brought these facts to the attention to the Minister. In regard to the estimated household income of these 2,117 applicants, 1,002 of them are in receipt of less than £4,000 per annum; a further 543 are in receipt of an income of between £4,001 and £6,000; a further 251 have an income between £6,001 and £8,000. That means that 1,796 of the 2,117 are in receipt of incomes of less than £8,000.
How in the name of God is it seriously suggested that this shared ownership scheme offers any hope to those 1,796 applicants in my local authority? It offers them no way out of a situation where many of them are walking the streets of Dublin because the requirements in the bed and breakfast accommodation to which they have been allocated requires them to leave at 9.30 in the morning and not return before 5.30 in the evening. This very day I was called out of the Finance Bill committee meeting in the Seanad Chamber to meet a family who have three children, one only six months old. They must get out of their bed and breakfast accommodation at 9.30 a.m. and walk the streets of Dublin until they are re-admitted at 5.30, with that six months old baby and two other small children. They will have to spend a period in limbo, in purgatory, before they have any prospect of being offered accommodation. Nobody, no matter how high their points on the priority housing list, will be housed because we have so many people on the homeless list.
From what I have heard of the debate I do not think there is any real understanding or appreciation of the housing crisis. I await hearing from Deputy Moynihan and my colleague on my left with regard to the serious problem outside Dublin, a problem which is being swept under the carpet.
I note that my colleague, Deputy Gilmore, made the remark that at least the unemployed have to queue weekly at the labour exchange and that one can see the number of people unemployed whereas in the case of the housing crisis one cannot see the people concerned; they are either hidden away behind the four walls of a hostel, in a bed and breakfast establishment, in grossly overcrowded family conditions or in sub-standard private rented accommodation. The Minister can therefore bring forward, under the guise of this Housing Bill or the plan for social housing, as many new-fangled ideas as he likes, some of which have merit — I endorse and support that — but unless we get back to building public sector housing again we will continue to have this trail of misery that I have spoken about.
It appears the Government are waiting for emigration to resume. There is no sign that any serious attention is being devoted to the kind of crash programme necessary. Only a few years ago parties who held out to the electorate the prospect that they would be in Government claimed they they would set out in specific terms the resources that would be allocated for the house building programme. Like so many other things, the fashion has been reversed. A house building programme is apparently the furthest thing from the minds of Ministers; I hope I cannot apply that remark to their advisers, but that would seem to be the situation.
Last year my own local authority, Dublin County Council, the largest local authority in the country, who cater for the needs of more than 500,000 people received an allocation to build 72 houses. Before the Minister replies, I am aware that they did not build 72 houses. I understand that when the Minister received a deputation from Dublin County Council recently he performed exceptionally well and took them unawares when he reminded them that they did not build 72 houses. For those of us who are members of Dublin County Council, it is a shame that those houses were not built. I have expressed my views on this in very trenchant terms at Dublin County Council meetings on a number of occasions; it is indefensible and a disgrace that we did not manage to build the 72 houses.
The bureaucrats will say that they did not receive notice or an allocation until June and that they then had to design plans. One would think that the 72 houses were of a different design — and I am not defending this — but a good performance from the Minister will not build one extra house in my constituency. While Dublin County Council are at fault on that aspect the truth of the matter is that the brunt of the case to be made by Dublin County Council is a valid, urgent and critical one and no surefooted performance by the Minister, well in control of his brief, will change the fact that there are 2,117 people on the housing list. That was the position before the Minister received the deputation and it was also the position after they left. Therefore it has changed nothing. This is a shame in a country which professes to care for its people.
Let me now turn to deal briefly with the tenant purchase scheme. I cannot understand all the hype and concentration on the shared ownership scheme. What was wrong with the tenant purchase scheme? What is the reason we do not have such a scheme? I have always supported the idea that local authority tenants should be encouraged to own their own homes. I do not see why we should have this staccato arrangement which has some notional date for the expiry of one scheme before a new scheme can be devised. Why should we not encourage people who are living in rented accommodation to purchase those houses? Apart from anything else in areas of broad public sector housing it automatically lifts the environment that people are living in. Why, therefore, are we holding on to the fig leaf that the 1988 scheme has to expire before we can bring in a new scheme?
This system of planning a tenant purchase scheme has only created anomalies. I do not think the last tenant purchase scheme was realistic and houses were given away at uneconomic knockdown prices. Tenants who purchased their houses under the 1988 sales scheme are living cheek by jowl with those who purchased under the previous scheme. For example, there are people in my constituency whose repayments are of the order of £22 per week, say, to Dublin Corporation, whereas those who purchased under the previous scheme are repaying sums of approximately £45 per week. This only gives rise to resentment within the same estate. I do not know who thought up the 1988 sales scheme and, again let me say, on behalf of my constituents, before anyone from Fianna Fáil circulates a leaflet indicating that I denounced the scheme, that many of them have done very well under the scheme and I am delighted about that but it could not have been an economic proposition and it has created this resentment.
What is required is a well balanced tenant purchase scheme to ensure that tenants have the means to purchase but not at bargain basement prices that were available under the 1988 scheme. Such a scheme would do wonders for a constituency like mine if we could encourage such a concept. As I said, it would greatly enhance the quality of life in the area. I plead with the Government to consider it.
I suspect that the Government introduced the 1988 scheme for the wrong reason; they wanted to get the maintenance costs off their back. It seems we want to get out of providing public sector housing. The maintenance burden is a heavy one. We want to get out and use the moneys for maintenance and other purposes rather than put the money into building new houses and encouraging more people to buy and own their own homes. There is a great opportunity to ease the housing crisis. On the question of maintenance, I welcome the provision in the Bill to involve tenants because, in my constituency, tenants feel greatly alienated from the local authority. It is a positive and welcome provision in the Bill which, I hope, will be put into effect.
Do the Minister, who is from Tipperary, the Minister of State from Cork or the advisers in the Department of the Environment, who probably only pass through my constituency on their way to Brittas Bay during the summer, have any appreciation of the kind of constituency which I represent? Do the planning authorities and politicians understand the historical legacy of the expansion of Dublin, 20 or 25 years ago, to the county area and the purchase of land in my area of west Dublin by Dublin Corporation who remain the housing authority although the administrative authority is Dublin County Council?
Is there any appreciation of the problems posed for my constituents as a result? There has been complete neglect by Dublin Corporation of the housing needs of the people in my constituency who pay them rent. It is all because of the central factor of no democratic accountability to the people, through their elected representatives, by Dublin Corporation. There is no estates management, no proper tenanting policy or no response maintenance of the calibre and quality which the people deserve. The reason is that no elected representative of any party in this House can stand up in Dublin City Council and demand to know from the manager what the situation is in regard to alleged drug pushing — there are three or four pushers in one street in my constituency — their lack of control in tenanting policy and casual vacancies and the total absence of estates management. Nobody can ask a manager in a city council to account for that and, as a result, we are the poor relations.
Problems of anti-social behaviour and problem tenants in other parts of Dublin are dumped in parts of my constituency as a convenient response by Dublin city management to the elected representatives in City Hall. We feel powerless to do anything about it. I am disappointed — unless the Minister can tell me to the contrary — that nothing in this Bill will facilitate a resolution of that problem. Do not tell me, as Dublin Corporation have told me in arid documents, that the situation is no worse in Tallaght, Clondalkin or parts of Blanchardstown than it is in Ballymun or Darndale. That is not true and the proof is that, cheek by jowl with corporation estates in my constituency, there are Dublin County Council estates and the way they are managed and kept, the way tenanting policy is handled and the way tenants' grievances are dealt with, is light years away from the treatment meeted out to Dublin Corporation tenants. It is not a question of a uniform policy or a uniform run-down of services; I know that Dublin Corporation have a major problem in terms of the budget and it is perfectly understandable that their officials respond to the greatest areas of pressure; that is human. If elected representatives stand up in the chamber in Dublin City Hall and challenge the manager it is normal for the manager to respond. However, the situation is getting out of hand in some estates in Tallaght, which is evident if you talk to the inspector of the Garda Síochána, social workers, religious, community leaders or other politicians. This cannot be allowed to continue; I am talking about estates where more than 60 per cent of the people are unemployed and a great many more than that in some areas.
The £5,000 grant to which I referred earlier cleared out people who are in employment. By definition they had to be employed to receive the grant, they moved out and were replaced predominantly — surveys showed the figure to be 73 per cent — by people who were unemployed. Consequently, we have a concentration of unemployed in these areas and as public representatives we seem powerless to respond to the situation. I do not know when this debate will end but I should like the Minister to seriously address this problem. We are talking about 5,000 units of local authority housing.
The former Minister for the Environment, Deputy Flynn, assured me in this House that the local government reorganisation Bill would provide a way out but it is almost impossible to get anywhere with Dublin Corporation. They do not seem to think that the solution which suggests itself, that the ownership of local authority houses in a given administrative area should be vested in the local authority who have that administrative responsibility and that they should have responsibility for housing. The former Minister for the Environment, Deputy Flynn, in a specific reply to me during the processing of the Local Government Bill suggested that it could be facilitated in the Bill. I wish that somebody in the Department of the Environment would tell that to Mr. Frank Feeley and his managers in Dublin City Council because they do not show any signs of facing up to the worsening crisis. Their argument is that they do not know where they will house their own people if their houses are taken. However, that problem can be dealt with by a common housing list in the greater Dublin area and there is no point in erecting bureaucratic barriers where none exist. There is no will on the part of Dublin City Council to acknowledge this problem; they have a kind of imperial approach to the county which they regard as a somewhat subservient local authority and that it should be administrated as Dublin Council deem correct.
I plead with the Minister to take time to be advised on this point and to see if we can make any improvements. A Leas-Cheann Comhairle, I regret that you have entered the House when I am winding up. I have drawn attention to fatal deficiencies in the central core of this Bill which establishes the necessary legislative framework to facilitate what the Minister clearly hopes will be the easy implementation of the shared ownership scheme. There are fatal flaws in the scheme, which I outlined, and I hope they will be addressed. I drew attention to the fact that the tenant purchase scheme should be revised as a priority and that a greater share of the receipts from the tenant purchase scheme should go towards a new building programme.
Above all, if we are to make any impact on the trail of misery about which I spoke, a crash building programme is necessary. The situation is now where it was in the sixties and it must be dealt with if we are not to have a Brixton, Toxteth or a Los Angeles on our doorsteps. I am amazed at the tolerance and the acquiesence of people who find themselves on the housing lists. They are not now organised as they were in the sixties but they will be so organised if we do not address the problem.
I acknowledge that there are some good measures in the Bill and I acknowledge that there are good measures in the social housing plan but I reject the political con trick that suggests to the people that the Bill is somehow a solution to the housing crisis. It is not.
I should like to see a greater role for the voluntary agencies. Agencies such as NADCORP have a facility, if the question of resources was addressed, to make a greater contribution to reducing the housing lists.
I do not believe that, at a time when, in my constituency, there is a trickle of regular home repossessions and a damburst of people on the housing list, battening down the hatches, cosmetically presenting the social housing plan as a solution and hoping that emigration will be revived earlier than we expect is an answer to the housing crisis. The one clear message that I should like to give to the Minister is that the housing crisis will not go away. I should like to hear his reply to that message.