People Before Profit proposes multiple amendments to Affordable Housing Bill to ensure genuinely affordable housing
In a statement today, prior to the committee and final stages of the Affordable Housing Bill 2021, which takes place in the Dáil today, People Before Profit’s housing spokesperson, Richard Boyd Barrett TD has said the government’s Affordable Housing Bill “will reinforce and potentially worsen the housing affordability crisis, benefit private developers” and “utterly fails to guarantee real affordability for working people currently priced out of a totally dysfunctional housing market.”
People Before Profit have submitted multiple amendments to the Affordable Housing Bill, seeking to delete the shared equity scheme, and ensure that Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) which will “only benefit profit hungry developers and property investment funds” are deleted from the text.
The People Before Profit amendments also seek to strictly define affordability as being no more than 25% of an applicants income to be paid as rent or on mortgage repayments to ensure genuine affordability, which the bill fails to define.
Richard Boyd Barrett TD said: “Last night, we had the scandal of the government passing an amendment giving tax breaks to cuckoo funds to buy up whole housing estates and apartment blocks, if they lease them to Local Authorities.
“Now we have an Affordable Housing Bill, that contains a shared equity scheme and Public Private Partnership provisions that will probably drive up the price of housing and will certainly reinforce that affordability crisis and private control of the dysfunctional housing sector. The Bill also utterly fails to define genuine affordability and even the prices and rents of “affordable” housing are likely to be set by the market, private developers and investment funds. It really is disgraceful.
“We have submitted a whole series of amendments to delete the shared equity scheme and Public Private Partnership provisions and ensure real affordability for working people on modest and average incomes.
“If the government fails to accept these amendments, we will have little choice but to oppose this bill.”
