Housing Minister must end ‘drip-drip’ of information and announce income increase for social housing, Boyd Barrett says

People Before Profit TD and Housing spokesperson, Richard Boyd Barrett, has called on Minister Darragh O’Brien to immediately announce the full-details of his plans to change income limits for social housing and social housing support eligibility for schemes such as HAP and RAS.

Deputy Boyd Barrett says Minister O’Brien is supplying a “drip-drip” of partial announcements over the last number of days.

In a paper produced earlier this summer, the ESRI estimated that the proportion of households entitled to apply for social housing or social housing support had dropped from 46.8 percent in 2011 to 33.9 percent in 2019 – a drop of more than 25 percent in the share of households entitled to social housing.

“The number of households who have been removed from the housing list and the proportion of households being denied the right to apply for social housing or social housing support has risen even more dramatically over the last couple of years,” Deputy Boyd Barrett said.

This is amounting to a “nasty under the radar but very substantial cut in the numbers eligible for social housing support,” he says.

Deputy Boyd Barrett says that the Government “broke a promise” made earlier this year to announce increases in the income threshold before the Dáil summer recess.”

In recent days there have been isolated reports from a small number of local authority areas of  increases in the income thresholds.

However, Deputy Boyd Barrett says “the increases in the threshold that we are hearing about are very small and only in a small number of counties.

“This is completely unacceptable and utterly inadequate.

“The Minister must immediately announce the details of the full national review and the thresholds need to dramatically increase to ensure social housing support for all the households who need it and particularly in the epi-centres of the housing crisis, such as Dublin, Cork and the big urban centres,” he says.

“For example, currently in Dublin a couple with one child has to take home less than €37,000 to be eligible for social housing.

“This leaves thousands of low paid workers and low and middle income households with no access to any housing supports at all and no chance of ever buying a house of their own.

“Finally, last Autumn Minister Darragh O’Brien announced that he was conducting a review.

“The results of this review have been on his desk for over eight months now and yet there has been no change to thresholds – leading to more and more desperate households in need of housing support being denied it.

“Every week more and more people are being removed from the list for being a couple of euro over the limit and when this happens, they lose access to any supports at all.”