Last night I was giving details of my experience as a member of two local authorities in my own constituency. I also outlined to the Minister of State how impossible it would be to meet the needs and demands of those already approved and placed on housing waiting lists due to a lack of commitment by the Government to a public housing programme and failure to provide the capital to complete existing waiting lists. It must be an embarrassment to the Minister, the Minister of State and Government representatives on local authorities that the only response from the Government to the housing crisis is to publish this Bill. There is nothing in it that will meet the needs, demands or worries of the applicants who have been approved for local authority houses.
I am sure the Minister of State will agree that one of the most important achievements for young married couples with a family, is to have a house of their own even if they have to pay excessive repayments. I indicated last night also that 10 per cent of people on the waiting list are being housed annually.
The South Tipperary local authority have 270 approved applicants. Compared with the cities of Dublin, Cork and other cities this may appear a small figure but it includes all the major towns and villages in the county. The Government in a proposal released this month indicated we can only provide 25 houses this year. At that rate it will be ten years before South Tipperary County Council can meet the existing waiting list, presuming nobody else needs a house during that time which is unlikely.
We have a housing crisis which is not confined to the local authorities in Tipperary. The position is very bad in Cashel and Carrick-on-Suir, and the latter town in addition has an unemployment crisis.
On the radio this morning a Fianna Fáil member accused me, and other Members, of not addressing the problems of Carrick-on-Suir. He must know from his consultations with his own Ministers —he is reluctant at times to discuss problems with Progressive Democrats Ministers — that the Government are not responding to any crisis whether it is unemployment, housing, health or whatever.
Over recent months the Minister identified this Bill as the response to all the problems. Last night I described that response as a disgrace. From my experience as a member of a local authority I know how difficult it is to meet the needs in this area. When introducing this Bill the Minister signalled a danger.
In his speech the Minister said, as reported at column 2346 of the Official Report:
I want to make it clear that the plan is intended to supplement, not to supplant, the traditional local authority house building programme. Indeed, there is a commitment in the plan and in the Programme for Economic and Social Progress to maintain the local authority programme—
He then qualified it by saying:
—at an appropriate level having due regard to resources and to the impact of the alternative measures.
The plan does, however, signal for the future a reduction in the historical degree of dependence on local authority house building.
That statement by the Minister that he was not supplanting the traditional role of local authorities is qualified by him saying, depending on the resources available. He warned us we will be moving away from local authority houses being provided by local authorities.
The Oireachtas is shirking its responsibility to allocate funds to local authorities to provide housing for those in need. If the policy being followed by the Government is continued it will be the death knell of the provision of houses by local authorities. There is little in this Bill to suggest that the historical role of local authorities in relation to housing will be taken over by any other agency. Such agency would need capital funding from the Government for such housing. Why by-pass a statutory authority which has a record second to none in housing? Local authorities have never once built a house that did not have three or four applicants for it. They have not built houses for the sake of building them. Carrick-on-Suir has an excellent record as a small local authority. Clonmel Corporation has had a magnificent record as indeed have all the officials, housing officers and town clerks attached to those local authorities. Now they are embarrassed week after week and month after month by our questioning as to what they are doing about the housing crisis. They are unable to respond because of the lack of capital funding from the Government.
Last night I formally thanked the Minister for the Environment who recently visited the constituency and agreed to sit down and talk to members of the council from all political parties who made a submission to him along the lines I am now putting on the record of this House. His only response, having met us, was that he was publishing this Bill which would address some of these problems. We are examining the Bill to see in what possible way it could address the housing crisis.
We have discussed at length with the housing officer at local authority level the idea of the shared ownership/leasing option and have come to the conclusion that this could be a recipe for disaster. In a scheme in which participants would put up half the cost of a house and the local authority the other half, participants will be faced with meeting the cost of a loan plus rent to the local authority. Over a period of 25 years, if they are fortunate enough to stay in employment, they will have to continue that double payment and will subsequently have to make arrangements to buy out the remaining share of the house from the local authority. I can see major problems arising. The income limit for eligibility for this scheme is pitched so low that with any indexation of costs it is inevitable that over the next 20 years or so participants will be under major financial pressure to meet both the mortgage and the local authority rent. At the end of the first period another mortgage must be taken out for an equivalent period to redeem the county council's part of the mortgage arrangement. I see this leading to tremendous financial difficulties. Local authorities will be faced with the obligation to repossess these houses, evict the people who opted for this shared ownership and rehouse them, with all the complications that will arise with the title deeds because of the shared ownership. What we should have done was to house them and give them the opportunity to purchase their own local authority house.
I want to compliment the previous Minister, Deputy Flynn, on the 1988 tenant purchase scheme which was successful in spite of the reservations expressed by other Deputies last night. There was a queue of applicants for this scheme. Unfortunately the conditions under which tenants could apply were narrow. If the scheme had been extended, many more would have applied. Indeed local authorities throughout the country requested by resolution that that scheme be extended to allow people the opportunity of owning their own house. The cost was pitched at a level of compensation which made it possible for people to avail of that scheme. It gave tenant purchasers pride in owning their own houses and removed from the local authority the obligation to carry out repairs, which is a major burden on local authorities and on which many millions of pounds are spent. It may be that from the beginning we should have ensured that the standard was better than it was. Aside from the removal of the burden on the local authority to carry out repairs, it is in the nature of Irish people to want to own their own homes. It is a legacy of the importance attached to owning one's own piece of land. It is something the Irish are proud of and they should be encouraged in that. I call on the Minister to give people that opportunity so that subsequently they will have the option of going into the private market and releasing local authority housing for other people on the list.
Last night a Deputy on the Government side criticised that scheme on the basis that it encouraged people to move to other areas. That was one of the reasons the scheme was discontinued. Now the Government have seen the light and have reintroduced a mortgage subsidy to assist people to move if they wish and release the local authority house. There is nothing wrong with people trying to better themselves. They should not be locked into housing schemes if they would be happier in another area and can improve their situation. We should give incentives to people to better themselves.
The new trend seems to be to shepherd people into villages and towns, and planners are obsessed with housing people in estates and groups of houses where there are services; but in the past local authorities made a major impact on the development of rural Ireland by refurbishing old cottages and isolated houses and building houses for people on their own sites. This was done through tenant purchase schemes or vesting schemes. Magnificent families, many of whom have had to emigrate and some of whom have married and have been housed elsewhere, were reared in those houses, but these were the original homes. They are the parents' houses, the vesting orders have been redeemed in full and to all intents and purposes, they are private houses.
In 1987, the Government scrapped every grant which would enable these people to refurbish these houses. The criticism was made, in particular by Fianna Fáil, that too much money was being spent refurbishing rural cottages and houses at colossal expense to the Exchequer. Yet, the building industry boomed during that period because the builders and contractors had to register for VAT and tax which benefited the Government and the industry provided employment and improved the housing stock.
Under the scheme introduced in this Bill, if a house is sound instead of rehousing the people living there — generally the parents who are tenant purchasers or vested owners and usually old age pensioners with limited disposable incomes — the local authority may spend £10,000 or £12,000 to bring it up to an acceptable standard and this money will have to be repaid to the local authority by way of rent. I ask the Minister to provide a subsidy to help tenants repay that money so that they will not be evicted from the house in which they invested their life savings and for which they paid rent, or die bankrupt. Having gone through all this and having redeemed their loan, they now have to repay the local authority by way of rent, the cost of refurbishing the house. However, I will reserve judgment of the scheme until I see the level at which the rent is pitched so that ownership will not be interfered with — that is very important — and that the local authority will be recompensed for the works carried out. The rent should be pitched at a level which would make it possible for old age pensioners to meet the repayments. As I said, it is old age pensioners in the main who are occupying these houses.
I would like to address the problems associated with HFA loans. Most of us, as members of local authorities, try to implement every scheme for applicants to purchase their own houses or to be involved with the local authority as the lending agency. Under the terms of the HFA loan scheme, the applicant's repayments were based on his income. We all realised that if his income dropped, his repayments were reduced. However none of us realised that at the higher end of the scale repayments were almost excessive but made relatively little contribution to the capital value of the house. At the other end of the scale, I know people who have lost their jobs and are on social welfare but because the repayments are so low and the value of the houses is increasing these unfortunate people will never be able to pay off their bill. Through no fault of their own, they will never be able to meet the entire cost of the HFA loan. We have now reached the stage where the only option open to these people is to take out a second mortgage from a building society or some other financial institution to redeem the HFA loan and to start again. That is extraordinary. When the scheme was initiated many years ago the recommendations of local representatives were accepted by those in need of housing. However, it was never envisaged that, when a person's income dropped to such a low level, despite meeting their weekly or annual repayments, they still owed money on the capital and they could end up with their children having to repay the HPA loan.
There are difficulties in getting some local authority housing loans. My local authority made a submission to the Department in which we asked them to waive some of their obligations so that people would not have to ask banks or building societies to refuse their legitimate applications in spite of the fact that mortgage repayments are lower in the case of loans from some outside agencies than they are from local authorities. People always believed a local authority loan was cheaper than a loan from a bank or building society because some of the legal and other costs were included. In the private mortgage sector one can only get a 90 per cent loan with the result that an applicant had to pay a high deposit. It is humiliating for people to find it necessary to go to a bank or building society and ask them to turn down their applications so that they meet the local authority requirements.
My local authority wrote to the Minister earlier this year requesting that the Department change the housing regulation in this regard but in his letter dated 30 April, the Minister said it was not possible to do so. He indicated that public funds could only be made available to those in need, but I am talking about applicants who qualified under the means test and whose income does not exceed £12,000. They should qualify for a local authority loan but we request them to go to a bank or building society to be refused before we will process their application, even though they have complied with the regulations set down by the Department, and can meet their repayments. That is very important.
For years now at each local authority meeting a list of people is presented which the council intend to pursue by way of notice to quit or evictions. Due to unemployment, these people are unable to meet some of their repayments. It is important that the local authorities and the housing officers carry out indepth investigations to ensure that an applicant will be able to repay the loan. No one is looking for loans for people who will be unable to repay them because they realise that will only get them into difficulty. However, they are bound by restrictions and the regime. I am disappointed that even as late as this month the Minister refused to change the criteria for the ordinary local authority housing loan. The way to address the housing need is to make loans available to genuine applicants in a limited category which would help them to help themselves. This policy has been followed in the past by successive Governments and local authorities but the present administration seem to want to make it more difficult. Indeed, I have a feeling that the Minister wants to give the cream of the market to the private sector which, of course, would be the Minister's philosophy and that of his colleagues in Government — that the private sector at all stages must be supported. We do not have any objection to the private sector but the public sector is also the responsibility of the Government and any funding available to the public sector by way of Housing Finance Agency loans, local authority and small loans funds and grants are incentives to people and would assist them in being rehoused. I ask the Minister to look again at this provision.
I also ask the Minister to look at the provision in relation to the new house grant section of his Department. The Minister has stated that, when building a house, a registered builder must be employed. In addition to having a qualified registered builder, the applicant is still expected to produce evidence that he paid at least £15,000 on VAT registered products when the house was being built. These regulations make it more difficult to build houses and they have denied people an opportunity to use the direct labour system to build houses, which can be cheaper by means of contracting with different people who are competent in the area of roofing, block-laying, design or plumbing. The Minister now expects all materials used to be VAT registered. I accept the principle of VAT and builder registration but I also recognise that unemployed people are competent to do this work. If they sign off the unemployment register — as many a stone-mason and builder's labourer have done —if they want to work on building houses where the materials used have had VAT levied on them and they can produce evidence to this effect, I see no objection to an applicant building a first house in a rural area, on a site of his own, being able to avail of the best expertise which may not be part of a huge contracting company. If the person can produce evidence of PRSI, unemployment assistance or qualification number, it should be accepted proof that the operator does not owe tax. I do not accept — this applies to all members of my party — that people should do "nixers" and sign on at the same time. However, people should be given the opportunity to come off the unemployment register and to be employed legitimately in building, an area in which they could be competent. If these people can show proof of the fact that they do not owe tax and are not drawing unemployment or other benefits, that they are legitimate builders and that the materials they used have been registered and subject to VAT, what more can one ask? That does not seem to be enough for the Department as they are insisting on a whole tier of regulations in this area which makes it very difficult to assist people to qualify for a miserly grant of £2,000 for a first time builder of a new house.
Most houses in rural areas cost £25,000 to £30,000, I am talking about ordinary three bedroomed houses. If we follow the philosophy advocated by the Department and local authorities that we shepherd everyone into villages and towns we must recognise that sometimes there are social problems as a result of people living so close to one another. Some of these people would be much happier in rural areas and it would be as cheap, if not cheaper, to build houses in rural areas because land is much cheaper than in a developed area or one zoned for development, where land is expensive. In my local authority area, the small urban council in Tipperary have a land bank available to people, they have sanitary services, sewerage, lights and footpaths but it costs £8,000 per house. What young married couple, unless they have a very good income, could pay £8,000 for a site and then build a house which must meet a certain planning requirement? Even the colour of the slates is designated. We have not really addressed local authority responsibility or assistance to the private sector for people who need some help. There is nothing new about this but the Minister decided, for financial reasons, to curtail that facility. There should be grants for people to build or repair their houses and regulations to ensure that loans are available which will be repaid at considerable expense. Everybody knows that when a mortgage is repaid it is double the amount originally borrowed. It is frightening for people who receive redundancy payments and who want to redeem their loan to find that, after ten or 12 years' payment, they owe as much as they borrowed. One must go through approximately 75 per cent of repayments before repaying capital. We are not asking for handouts, we are asking for the facility to be able to borrow at a reasonable interest rate.
Local authority interest rates must always be pitched lower than the private sector because the private sector is available to people who can reasonably afford to take out a mortgage. They are welcomed — indeed coaxed — by the building societies to do so because that is their business. However, a local authority which operate a grant, assistance, housing or loans scheme always do so on the basis that they are a housing authority and must house people or assist them to house themselves. That is the philosophy but most of the provisions in the Bill do not address it. The Minister indicated that at the end of the day we would no longer be dependent on the traditional way of local authorities providing houses. There is a great need for housing, especially social housing, in which I am sure the local authority or a local co-operative housing agency will be involved with assistance from the Department.
I hope that the people who will qualify for assistance will receive care and attention from the agencies which deal with social problems in the community. I am taking about the responsibility of the health boards because there are vulnerable people in our housing estates. They are vulnerable to attack from vandals and to gangs of youths interfering with their privacy and damaging their property. They are vulnerable at all times because of health disadvantages. It is those people who should receive aid under social housing programmes, and the houses they occupy in ordinary housing estates should be re-allocated to families who would be able to fend for themselves.
In the past, because of a lack of experience, we housed old people, retired people, widowers and widows and even single parents, in small houses within a normal housing estate. At the time we all believed that it was right to mix small houses and big houses, that it was a good thing for older people and retired people to live in an area where there was activity — an area in which they would always have company and there would always be someone to look after them. We envisaged the operation of a community alert scheme under which residents in family homes would always ensure that the older people, the widowers and the widows in smaller houses would have the company of others and would be in contact with activity. What none of us realised at the time was that in housing estates where there are hundreds of children those children have no regard, and could not be expected to have regard, for old age pensioners, who would like a little privacy and a little peace and quite rather than having 25 or 50 children playing football outside their door and in their gardens.
Some of my own constituents from the town of Cahir have prepared and submitted a document to all public representatives, itemising the difficulties faced by old people living in a highly active area that has many children. That document should be studied and the difficulties examined. We do have a responsibility not to put people into an area where they will be unhappy and which could easily become a kind of ghetto for them; so that they almost look forward to the day that they will be removed from their own home and admitted to a geriatric hospital or a welfare home just so that they can get a little peace and quiet. It is a shame that in practice our policy of mixed housing has worked out that way. We provided for open plan housing, with no boundary walls and no facilities for privacy, but we did not realise that residents would face trespass. Of course, children do not think that they are trespassing. For them it is par for the course to play outside when they come home from school. During the school holidays some old people are unable to cope with all of the activity happening around them.
The continued availability of some grants, particularly the disabled person's grant, is welcome. I am disappointed that a warning has been issued to local authorities of a limitation in any year on the payment of such assistance for disabled persons. Tragedy can happen in any home and at any time because of an accident or a stroke, for example. At times major changes have to be made to houses to make it possible for disabled people to remain in their own home. There should be no restriction on the amount of money available in any year when such a sensitive issue as the housing of disabled people is involved. The number concerned is not great but we do need to be able to accommodate all applicants for disabled persons' assistance who come before local authorities.
I am concerned that the Bill does not really address the housing crisis that is faced by every one of us. The Minister has heard of the crisis in his own constituency and in his own corporation area and I have heard about it through the councils in my own area. As I said last night, various agencies calling themselves "housing action groups" are now coming together to advocate direct action with councillors. They blame the Government and they blame the Minister. The only answer to the crisis is finance. We need money to be able to meet the demand upon us. If we do not make some effort to meet the demand then other groups will exploit the homeless — and it is being done now — and use them in their agitation and campaigns at election time. Representatives from those groups will go forward as candidates for election on the basis that they represent the homeless. There are now so many homeless in all of our constituencies that the numbers are becoming quotas. Last night Deputy Durkan said that they are probably not a very strong lobby, but they are being made into a very strong lobby. All of us in public life have a responsibility to bring that to the attention of the Minister. If we do not bring the problem to his attention then we will fail and the groups I have talked about will be able to convince the homeless that the Minister has not responded and that we have all forgotten them because of cost and an inability to do anything.
Under the 1988 legislation for the housing of the homeless the Minister made unlimited capital available to local authorities for the provision of halting sites for itinerants and to buy houses on the open marketplace in order to house itinerants. I welcome that initiative. However, we cannot purchase houses under that scheme to house people who are not itinerants but who are as badly in need of accommodation.
I also welcome the provision to exclude a two-mile zone in and around halting sites from unauthorised camping by itinerants so that those people will be brought into the area of the camping site. My local authority and the Clonmel Corporation have incurred considerable expenditure in providing properly serviced halting sites for itinerants. That has also been done in Cashel and in Tipperary. We ourselves operated an area that was zoned by the courts to preclude people from unauthorised camping in or near halting sites. In the court, however, the judge refused to make a judgment, even though we had declared an area as zoned. We tried to convince the public that if we as a local authority provided proper services for them it would solve all our problems and no other unauthorised parking could take place within a certain restricted area, but our efforts were not successful.
I hope that the Roads Bill, also coming before the House, and this Bill will strengthen the legislation and make it obligatory for district judges to operate the spirit of the law to make sure that unauthorised camping and caravan parking by itinerants does not take place in and around halting sites or on our national primary roads, where they seem to want to park, with tremendous disregard for the rights of property owners. It is known that if comment is made about such parking or about other extraordinary activities in or near gateways a hive of itinerants arrive and everything, from beds to washing machines, is dumped over a fence. Just because somebody had the cheek to say "You are on my private property" or "You are causing an obstruction on the public road" they feel a need to get their own back. This issue has to be firmed up for people who are not the true itinerants but merchants of the road. I have called on farmers and on others to stop doing business with those people, whether that business be road dressing, gravelling paths, the purchase of gates or whatever. If people did not do business with itinerants they would not park in an area.
We must give ourselves the powers to deal with this festering problem. By doing that we will assist local authority members to meet the challenge of providing halting sites. Halting sites have been successful where they operate. There is a strict regime relating to the type of people who will be allowed into the halting sites in order to prevent difficulties arising in them. The Minister is aware that this is a major problem. It is mentioned in the Bill so I would ask him to ensure that legislation is strengthened in this area. This policy should be carried through in the Roads Bill. Between both Bills we should have an opportunity through court procedures to exert our rights and the rights of the settled community. Nobody wants to be unduly critical or unchristian in their attitude to genuinely homeless people but none of these people want housing. They want to be able to stop, sell their wares, beg in an area for weeks on end and then move to another place. We find that they have many fine mansions elsewhere to which they return for holidays. That is a new phenomenon that has struck rural Ireland. The local authorities have not been able to address it because the law is deficient in that area.
I commend the good parts of the Bill to the House but the Bill will not address the housing crisis. If the Minister pleads inability because of lack of funds, at least the people will know that but the Minister should not produce an alternative system which he knows will not work.
