Housing: no big move by Labour

HOUSING POLICY is one of the issues that goes to the heart of our current economic crisis. More than health or education, it is an area of policy that successive governments left to the mercy of the market.
Some of the consequences are widely acknowledged, such as the massive property bubble and subsequent house price crash. Unfortunately, equally important consequences continue to be ignored — like housing inequality.
At the peak of the boom, when we were building more homes than at any other time in our history, homelessness remained a consistent problem. The 4,500 people denied a secure and permanent home were just the tip on an iceberg of people living in inappropriate or inadequate housing.
At least 130,000 families are currently on local authority housing lists, up from 56,000 in 2008. The number of families claiming rent supplement — an emergency benefit for people unable to meet the costs of their rent — has risen from 60,000 to over 100,000 during the same period.
And with 500 families falling into serious mortgage distress every week, levels of housing need are set to increase dramatically in the coming months and years.
In response to this growing crisis, the new Labour Party junior minister with responsibility for housing, Willie Penrose, has released a Housing Policy Statement, setting out how he and the Fine Gael/Labour Government intends to meet housing need. It’s nothing more than a restatement of housing policy as pursued by the previous Fianna Fáil junior minister, Michael Finneran.
Without even a hint of irony, the statment announces the continuation of Part V planning arrangements — the 20% affordable or social housing rule — which would be good news except for the fact that nobody is building any private houses.
The most significant part of the document is the section on social housing. It promises to make meeting acute housing needs the “main focus” of housing policy.
And how does Junior Minister Penrose plan to achieve this? By reviewing the operation of rent supplement and extending the previous government’s social housing leasing initiative.
A review of rent supplement is not in itself a bad thing, depending on its outcome. But the idea that the leasing initiative will somehow manage to address the housing needs of the 4,500 people who are homeless, let alone tens of thousands on council waiting lists, is pure fantasy.
Fianna Fáil’s Michael Finneran introduced the leasing initiative with great fanfare in 2009. The idea was to divert monies intended for building new social houses into long-term leasing arrangements between private landlords and local authorities. In its first year it resulted in zero new social tenancies. It represented the very worst of housing policy under Fianna Fáil.
That it forms the centrepiece of the new government’s social housing policy is as regrettable as it is predictable. It certainly can’t be defined as a “fundamental reconfiguration of the landscape of housing support”.  And like its previous incarnation under Fianna Fáil, it will fail.
We urgently need a change of direction in housing policy.
Central to this must be the provision of up to 200,000 local authority housing units, double the current number. Without direct provision of housing by the state for those unable to afford the market, housing need will continue to increase.
Despite all the pre-election bluster, it seems that under the new Fine Gael/Labour Government it is ‘more of the same’ when it comes to housing policy.