Rent pressure zones have 'discouraged' the supply of new homes, Dáil committee told
Members of the Housing Commission — whose landmark report on recommendations to fix Ireland's housing crisis was published over 12 months ago — also told the Oireachtas housing committee on Tuesday there had been a 'lack of emergency thinking and action' since its report came out.
The Housing Commission was established in January 2022 as an independent body to examine Ireland's housing system and to make recommendations to shape long-term policy.
This commission was made of representatives from across the housing sector, including developers and those delivering housing on the ground, and found Ireland's housing system has 'fundamentally systemic' failures.
It made a slew of recommendations for a new approach to the housing sector to meet the needs of the Irish public, estimating there was an underlying undersupply of over a quarter of a million homes in the country.
Since its publication, some members have been critical of what it called State inaction on taking up its recommendations. The Government has hit back at this, however, and insisted it was implementing the report.
The appearance of Housing Commission members at the Oireachtas committee on Tuesday coincided with the Government publishing its controversial plans to reform the rental sector and its rent pressure zones.
UCD professor of social policy Michelle Norris told the committee the commission proposed a 'comprehensive reform' of the system of rent pressure zones that had been 'introduced as an emergency measure in 2016 to regulate private rents and was never intended to be in place over the long term'.
'We propose replacing the RPZs with the reference rent system used to regulate rents in many other European countries," she said.
Trinity College's Dr Ronan Lyons said, from the new Government proposals, vacancy de-control seemed to be the most important.
This is where landlords would be able to set market rates for a property if a tenant moved out.
Meanwhile, Michael O'Flynn, chief executive of the construction firm O'Flynn Group, said during covid-19 there was a highly coordinated approach across Government and they were similarly dealing with a housing 'emergency' now.
'Unfortunately, this approach has not been taken into the housing crisis, and the result is it's getting more and more challenging,' he said.
'The Housing Commission was a very serious attempt to provide a framework for Government to deal with the crisis in a holistic way.
"It provided a strategic approach which, if adopted, would over the medium term, deal with the serious backlog of over 300,000 homes.'
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Government yet again tinkering around the edges of the housing crisis with rent pressure zone plans
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