Eoin Ó Broin: Government Rent Reforms Fuel Evictions Crisis

Thank you Ciann Comhairle and I move the motion and I just want to acknowledge the fact that the Minister is in a meeting with the Oliver Bond Regeneration Forum and I do hope he listens very carefully to what he hears from the residents. Last Ciann Comhairle, 10 months ago the government announced what can only be described as the most controversial restructuring of the private rental sector in a decade. The Minister unilaterally changed apartment standards and not in a good way. He outlined changes to rent regulation that was introduced earlier this year and also made it clear that it was their intention to give massive tax breaks to apartment developers and when the Minister outlined this both at the time and subsequently he said that he was doing this because he believed it would increase the supply of much needed homes and that over time rents would reduce. And we said then and we're saying now that in fact the only thing that that cocktail of policy changes would do was make renters pay for the failed policies of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael over a decade. We warned you that it wouldn't work, that it would lead at the very best to a modest increase in apartment supply in parts of Dublin and possibly in Cork city but that that supply would be poorer quality, smaller, darker and more expensive and the rest of the country would get completely left behind. But what we also made it clear is that the introduction of the controversial market rent reset would see a dramatic increase in new rents for new tenancies from March of this year and the incredibly confusing and poorly thought through changes to tenure arrangements would lead to widespread confusion and an undermining of tenant security. And it gives me no pleasure to say this but last week's residential tenancies board director's report confirms our worst fears. The government did such a bad job of explaining what were incredibly complex tenure rules that it has led to an acceleration of the exit of single property landlords from the market. 7,000 eviction notices in the first three months of this year, the highest on record of 51% on the previous quarter and in fact according to one academic the highest level of evictions since the famine. That is truly astonishing and contrary to the government's attempts to explain this away it is the third straight quarter we've seen a dramatic increase in eviction notices since minister brown announced his fool hardy changes. The residential tenancies board report also announced rents increasing significantly up to the end of last year. It's now more than 20,000 euros minimum on average to rent across the state. In Dublin at the end of last year a minimum of 26,000 euros and it's going to be very very interesting when we get to see the first set of daft figures which are imminent on the market rent reset but we will comment on them when they are published. So what the minister's proposals have done will have a very limited impact on supply but they will have a huge impact on renters and what does that mean? Well right now thousands upon thousands of renters, single people, couples, families with children, pensioners, can't quarter, now don't know where they're going to live in six months time. They're now desperately searching for an alternative rental just at the time that government allows landlords to jack up the rent for those new rentals and what's going to be the consequences? Well you'll get some renters who will be able to find a new home but they will be paying thousands upon thousands of extra euros in rent above what they would have been otherwise paying. Many others won't be able to get those rentals particularly in the big cities in Waterford, in Galway, in Limerick, in Cork. Again the daft.ie figures whenever they're published are going to be very revealing. So what are they going to do? Well in many cases working people, singles, couples, families with children will be forced the indignity of moving back in with their parents because they have nowhere else to go. Others will see it as the straw that breaks the camel's back and they'll have no option but to emigrate to Canada, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere. But worst of all we are going to see an acceleration in the number of singles, couples and adults with children presenting as homeless and entering into emergency accommodation at a time the number of people in emergency accommodation is higher than any other time since those records began. That is the consequences of this government's policy. You have done it knowingly, you have done it deliberately and you have done it for no good reason. So the PMB motion that we have tabled tonight is not just to highlight all of these government failures but to tell the government loud and clear that renters need a different approach. An approach that actually recognises that rents are already too high and they need to be cut. An approach that recognises that rent increases cannot be allowed to continue indefinitely and we do need an emergency ban on rent increases for a period of three years. And also crucially at a time when our homeless services are completely overwhelmed we need an emergency ban on no-fault evictions where the tenant has done nothing wrong. Of course what we really need is not larger volumes of smaller, darker, more expensive apartments but we need the right kind of supply in the right place at the right place. That means government should be introducing the kind of reforms set out by Sinn Féin, the Housing Commission and others to see the supply of social, genuinely affordable and private for purchase homes increased and accelerated way beyond where the government is currently at. The question I ask the Minister is how bad do things have to get before you accept you have done something wrong? How much more hardship will you foist on renters? Our PMB sets out the alternative. It's time the government stopped looking after the interests of big investors and developers and started standing up for renters and it's on that basis I commend this motion to the House.