The eviction ban U-turn is a start, but the minister has to do lots more
ON WEDNESDAY the Dáil will debate and vote on the Government’s winter eviction ban legislation. It is expected that the Bill will pass and take effect from November 1. The ban will mean that where a tenant has a notice to quit with a due date that falls after the enactment of the legislation, they will be protected from eviction until April 1 at the earliest.
In some cases, depending on when the notice was served and the length of tenancy, the protection will last until June 18.
The ban will not protect tenants whose notice to quit due date fell before the start of November.
Nor will it apply to tenants who refuse to pay their rent, damage the property or engage in antisocial activity.
Opposition parties, including Sinn Féin have tabled amendments, to address weaknesses in the legislation.
The introduction of the legislation by the Minister for Housing Darragh O’Brien represents a massive U-turn.
For months, as homeless numbers were rising to unprecedented levels, the minister rejected calls to introduce a winter ban on evictions.
France has operated such a ban for decades. In Scotland, the SNP government introduced a winter ban just last month.
Having ended the Covid-19 ban on evictions in April 2021, Darragh O’Brien and his Cabinet colleagues said any new ban would be unconstitutional.
So what changed their minds? The straight answer is the Government’s own housing policy failure. The number of adults and children presenting as homeless and in emergency accommodation has increased almost every month since the minister ended the last ban.
In August, the official homeless figure released by the Department of Housing surged to 10,805 people including 3,220 children.
The prospect of that figure rising even higher and breaching 11,000 for the first time forced Fianna Fáil to accept that an eviction ban was necessary.
However, commentary from the Tánaiste Leo Varadkar last week indicated that Fine Gael were unconvinced.
What pushed them over the line was a memo from the Department of Housing to Cabinet on Tuesday.
As reported in the Irish Times, the memo outlined that emergency homeless accommodation in 19 of 31 local authorities was full to capacity. Many other councils were close to capacity.
If nothing was done, we would have witnessed the appalling spectacle of large numbers of families with children being sent to sleep in Garda stations due to lack of emergency accommodation.
WE WOULD also have seen a winter surge in single people forced to sleep rough. Faced with the inevitable, Fine Gael relented and the winter eviction ban legislation was approved. The immediate trigger for the recent increase in homeless presentations has been the rise in single-property landlords exiting the market. However, it is the Government’s failure to provide an adequate supply of social and affordable homes that is the ultimate underlying cause.
The social housing targets contained in the Government’s housing plan are too low. Worse still
Darragh O’Brien is not meeting these anaemic targets.
In 2020, social housing delivery fell short of the Government’s target by 2,151 homes. In 2021, the shortfall was 3,181 homes. By June of this year just 20% of the 9,000 promised social homes had been delivered.
Government housing policy is causing the homeless crisis. Landlords’ representative organisations have criticised the ban. They claim it will lead to more singleproperty landlords existing the market. Many, myself included, are unconvinced of this. So long as house prices remain at historic highs, accidental, pension-pot and some semi-professional landlords will sell up no matter what.
The more pressing point is, what will Government do to address the actual cause of the problem? A winter ban on evictions is not a solution. But it does provide Government with some breathing space.
Mr O’Brien has yet to outline what he is going to do with that breathing space to ensure we are not back in the same place next year when the eviction ban ends.
There are a number of immediate actions he needs to take to ensure that this does not happen.
The Government must expand the tenant-insitu scheme were councils buy private rental properties with Housing Assistance Payment or Rental Accommodation Scheme tenants who have a notice to quit. The Minister for Housing must issue a written instruction to all local authorities to temporarily suspend their ordinary social housing allocations scheme when deciding on such purchases.
Mr O’Brien must use his emergency planning powers, combined with high-grade permanent modular building technology, to fasttrack additional social housing supply.
It takes 11 weeks to construct such homes and with enough urgency there is no reason why up to 1,000 could not be delivered by April.
Government must also provide local authorities with additional funding and discretion to buy and refurbish vacant and derelict homes with a focus on those than can be turned around quickly.
Finally, the minister needs to cut the red tape imposed on councils and approved housing bodies to allow them to accelerate their existing social housing programme and meet their targets. Mr O’Brien has been Minister for Housing for over two half years. Homelessness has never been higher and social housing output never so off target. He has one last chance to get it right. Thousands in emergency accommodation and at risk of homelessness are depending on him.