Hosuing is a right

April 11, 2007

Sinn Féin believes that housing, like healthcare, is a basic inalienable human right. We now have the resources to realise this right for everyone: to ensure that all people have access to adequate and appropriate, secure accommodation, and also to end exploitation by unscrupulous landlords, mortgage lenders, estate agents and management companies. Most importantly, we have the means to end homelessness in Ireland for good.

Current Government policy favours wealthy developers, speculators and landowners over first-time and principal home buyers and particularly over individuals and families on lower incomes who are priced out of the housing market. Thus they find themselves on social housing waiting lists or locked into highly risky 100% mortgages they cannot afford, or renting substandard properties at high rents from unscrupulous and largely unregulated landlords, or at worst on the street. This policy has created a crisis in housing with over 43,000 households on local authority waiting lists - some for up to seven years - and thousands of homeless people. Meanwhile one in seven houses in the State lies vacant.

Only Sinn Féin has a credible plan to make housing available to all on the basis of full equality.

The Sinn Féin Housing Reform Package

Sinn Féin proposes fundamental reform to ensure that everyone has equal access to adequate, appropriate and affordable accommodation as of right. We will bring social housing to the centre of provision, with an ambitious five year social housing new build programme. We propose radical complementary measures to intervene in the housing market to prevent the anti-social private housing speculation that fuels house price inflation to ensure that more affordable housing is available and is actually affordable. We are also proposing the introduction of a more robust and comprehensive system of tenant rights including rent control.

The Sinn Féin Record in Leinster House:

• Our Dáil Team called on the Government to adopt and implement the National Economic and Social Council (NESC) recommendations on the provision of social housing.
• We proposed a legislative amendment to section 5 of the Housing (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2004, proposing a requirement to price housing units designated as 'affordable' at cost-price, meaning a price equal to the cost of construction.
• We published and debated legislation to remove the 'get-out clauses' for developers under the Planning and Development Acts that allow them to pay off local authorities rather than provide social and affordable housing units (the Planning and Development (Amendment) Bill 2006).
• We published and debated legislation to introduce a constitutional right to housing (the Twenty-Seventh Amendment of the Constitution (No. 2) Bill 2003, which sought to amend Article 40 of the 1937 Constitution).

Sinn Féin Priorities in Government:

The Right to Housing

• Hold a referendum to add the right to adequate and appropriate housing in the 1937 Constitution.
• Establish a Housing Ombudsman to provide an administrative remedy short of the courts.
• Establish a National Housing Strategy and a National Housing Agency to plan and regulate all aspects of housing provision on an all-Ireland basis.
• Establish a Department of Housing with a full Minister.

Increase Supply of Social and Affordable Homes

• Construct 70,000 new units by 2012 to accommodate social housing need (a new build rate of approximately 14,000 per annum).
• Amend the Planning and Development Act (2002) to remove the 'get-out clauses' for developers in Part V, and stipulate that all new developments must allocate 30% to social and affordable housing, with at least 10% social and at least 10% affordable housing.
• Oppose any sale of public land to private developers by local authorities in the absence of adequate social housing provision and reject any local authority housing plan that does not contain social and/or affordable housing or does not promote social inclusion.
• Plan to end local authority waiting lists, with a target to supply suitable accommodation to 70% within two years.
• Legislate to require that any social housing stock sold is replaced on a unit-for-unit basis, with the profits received by local government ring-fenced and matched by central government to replenish social housing stock.
• Use Compulsory Purchase Orders to acquire land, derelict properties and properties vacant for 12 months or more for social housing, allowing a fair and transparent appeals procedure.

Ending Homelessness

• Develop an All-Ireland Strategy on Homelessness, with meaningful targets and adequate resources to progressively reduce and eliminate homelessness (beginning with elimination of street homelessness by the year 2010).
• Put the existing homelessness strategies and Local Homelessness Action Plans on a statutory footing.
• Honour the commitment made in Towards 2016 that by 2010 nobody will be living in emergency accommodation for longer than an actual emergency.

Making Principal Home Ownership more Accessible

• Legislate to ensure that housing units designated as 'affordable' are priced at cost-price.
• Increase mortgage interest relief for first time mortgage-holders and principle home owners who earn up to the average industrial wage.
• Take strong action against speculative practices that inflate housing prices, such as abolishing tax incentives that effectively encourage unfair competition between investors and first-time or principal home buyers, introducing a tax on windfall gains from planning decisions in recognition and compensation for betterment by the State and imposing a statutory ceiling on the price of land zoned for housing.
• Support and promote co-operative housing ownership.
• Establish Universal Design and Lifetime Adaptability Guidelines and incorporate them as legal a requirement for all new build houses, with a national monitoring system for implementation.

Protect the rights of Principal Home Owners

• Create a Housing Agency to establish legally enforceable codes of practice for developers, house builders and vendors, mortgage brokers, estate agents, auctioneers and solicitors.
• Establish a Housing Ombudsperson with a remit to monitor and enforce the relevant codes of conduct, provide an effective remedy short of the courts, monitor the implementation of housing and planning legislation, monitor changes in house prices, mortgage interest rates and professional fees, support enforcement of snag lists and ensure an end to gazumping.
• Strengthen regulation of property management companies, and legislate to ensure all public areas are managed by the local authority and not outsourced to private management.
• Legislate to improve the standard of housing and apartments including increasing the minimum size of one bed and two bed apartments, increasing the ceiling height, ensuring that balconies are recessed into apartment space and ensuring that social and affordable housing is built to the same standard as private housing in the same development.

A Tenants' Rights Charter

• Introduce a system of comprehensive legal protection for tenants, including: a system to regulate, monitor and enforce security of tenure standards (regarding length of leases, deposits and evictions), accommodation standards (including a right to maintenance and repairs) and a system of rent control for fair rent.
• Legislate for the power to bar unscrupulous landlords from letting property.

Sustainable Warm Homes

• Fully enforce environmental sustainability regulations on new build and review these to ensure they are sufficiently robust. Ensure all new social housing is fitted with energy-efficient alternative energy sources.
• Introduce Low Income Full Cost Residential Renewable Energy Grants for Fuel Allowance recipients, increase the Greener Homes Scheme grants to cover a greater percentage of approved cost, and extend the Warmer Homes Scheme to meet the needs of an additional 10,000 homes a year.

Promoting Housing for Sustainable Rural Communities

• Reform the planning laws to support the right of rural dwellers to build on their own land or to purchase and build locally.
• Create a grant scheme to encourage first-time house buyers in rural areas to renovate derelict houses.
• Expand of the Rural Cottage Scheme.

Sustainable, Safe Communities

• Provide for direct community participation in housing planning by establishing statutory Local Community Planning Fora.
• Legislate to ensure that a community's social needs (including local access to employment, to services such as public transportation, healthcare centres, childcare centres and schools and to amenities such as public play and recreation areas, and shopping and social centres) are incorporated into all housing schemes from the earliest stage.
• Support high-density housing developments only where they are designed to support family living, located in mixed tenure areas, have good transport links, shops, schools, essential services and sufficient open public spaces.
• Introduce a positive area-based 'Good Community Agreements' scheme involving both public and private tenants and property owners, to enhance community input, participation and ownership of local strategies to prevent and tackle criminal and anti-social behaviour.
• Ensure consistent criminal sanction against criminal behaviour and that eviction is not used in place of prosecution.