Paul Murphy warns new rent rules will raise rents, hurt students

Thanks. It is interesting in debates in the House here and on the media how the Government won't own its own proposals. They tell us that what you are doing is going to increase investment in the rental sector and that ultimately will bring rents down. That is the underlying logic of what the Government is doing. But you refuse to say the bit in the middle in terms of why is this going to increase investment in the rental sector, which is because the plan is to raise rents. But the Government every time they are asked this they try to wriggle away from it and say there are lots of things. But the fundamental most important thing that the Government is doing is trying to allow rents to rise even faster. That is Government policy now, is to increase rents in the supposed hope that through increasing rents, rents will actually come down in the long run. It is the magic of the market. And you expect people to buy this. You expect people to believe that somehow you are acting in the interest of those who you are hiking rents for. That somehow you are acting in the interest of young people who are forced to emigrate or unable to move out of the family home. That you are acting in the interest of workers who were being crucified by rent of 2,000, 2,500, 3,000 or more a month by allowing rents to go even higher. Rather than clearly this being an act of a Government of landlords acting in the interest of landlords, in particular the big corporate landlords. I want to focus for a few minutes on the same issue that Deputy O'Gorman was focused on, on the question of student accommodation. Because students are the group that are most egregiously affected by what the Government is proposing. Effectively students are going to be taken out, students in the private rented sector are not going to have any protections whatsoever in terms of the level of rents. Every time they return to college they are going to see a new significant hike in their rents. The day after the Government announced their new proposals, the Minister for Higher Education, Minister Lawless, was in before us at the Committee on Higher Education. I asked him on that day about this. I put to him how this is going to work, that there will be no rental protection for students in private rented accommodation every time they change tenancy and so on, and asked if that was accurate. He emphasised that we have a new proposal which was introduced yesterday that will come into effect next March. There will be a lot of water under the bridge between now and next March. I will sit down with my colleague, the Minister for Housing, with whom I have spoken numerous times in student accommodation, and will delve into the detail about how it will affect the student accommodation sector. I couldn't believe it, that the Minister for Higher Education, who was telling us that a priority was student accommodation, didn't seem to know how this was going to affect students, but was reassuring us that it will be grand. There is loads of time between now and March, and we will sort it out, and students won't be negatively affected. I read the newspaper headlines on the Monday with interest, and thought, oh good, here we have a Minister who is listening to the Opposition and is going to protect students. The headline in the Irish Times was Minister wants exemptions to new rent rules to be considered for students sharing houses. Students should not be inadvertently disadvantaged by the new regime, says spokesman for James Lawless. But on Tuesday, presumably all the water under the bridge had passed, and we hear from page headline, the Irish independent, no additional protections for students in private sector under new rental rules, the Minister admits. So that's it. I was accurate in my summation of things at the committee. The Minister, in saying that there was a load of water going to pass under the bridge, and don't worry, things will be fine by March, was trying to mislead people, or himself didn't know what was happening. The truth is, students are being thrown to the wolves by this proposal. I mean, it is incredible when it's the number one crisis facing the third level education system, that students are going to be taken out of any protection whatsoever. And the government often likes to say, to the opposition, there's a few things they say. They say, one, you've no proposals, right? And you can write books on it, as two of the members have here. You can put forward very, very detailed proposals in budget proposals and policy, you know, no matter what you do, the government will say, oh, you've no proposals, right? So no matter the level of detail you produce, they'll say you've no proposals. But the other thing they'll say is, well, you're being ideological. You have an ideological aversion to the private rental market. This is ideology. And you're expected to believe that the government over there has no ideology whatsoever. But, like, for 10 years now, Fianna Fá and Fine Gael have been trying to incentivise the private sector, be it private developers or the institutional investors, to come and resolve the housing crisis. Money has been thrown at them. Now, they don't pay any tax when they're REITs on rental income. Cree Conaghy scheme. The Hap scheme, which is over a billion euros a year now, with other subsidies to landlords every single year. The waiver of development levies. Money is thrown at these developers and private landlords. And the crisis has gotten worse, not better. And so the government goes back into the same toolbox, marked free market fundamentalism, and says, you know what, we need rents to rise further, that's what's going to resolve the crisis, because that will attract investment. And the government expects us to believe that you have no ideology. It is like free market fundamentalism. It's a triple trickle down idea of what's going to happen in terms of housing. And it's actually interesting, if you read the report that the government is basing their own proposals in terms of rent pressure zones and increasing rents further, it's clear there that institutional investors are making healthy profits in Ireland, in the rental sector. They're not making a loss, they're making a healthy profit. But the idea is that we need to give them even more profit, so they invest here in this sector, rather than somewhere else. I mean, how, without free market fundamentalist ideology, does this make any sense? That we transfer more money of workers, either directly or indirectly through the state, or directly from workers in terms of paying more rent, to the super, super rich, in the hope that they're going to resolve the housing crisis, as opposed to saying, well, we have money, we have very substantial surpluses, we have a housing crisis, and building housing creates a revenue, and we need to build social and genuinely affordable housing at scale, directly with a state construction company. Like, that's the answer to the housing crisis, that's the answer in terms of supply, or it's the centre of the answer. And the reason it isn't pursued is because of the ideology, and what lies behind the ideology is class interests, is that the government fundamentally does not represent renters, does not represent workers, does not represent young people, instead represents big landlords, big private developers and the rest. Thank you, Deputy Murphy. Thank you.