Eoin Ó Broin
Dublin Mid-West · Sinn Féin · Ireland
“It is disappointing that, when several journalists have contacted the Government and the Department looking to confirm on the record that HAP and RAS tenants are not included - we know that they are not - and set out why and if that will be reconsidered, instead of giving a straight answer that, yes, they have been excluded, and explainin…”
“Will it try to remove survivors when they chain themselves to the gates in protest, as they have said they will, or will it finally listen to them and hear their calls for respect, justice and truth? Will it buy the Bessborough site and stop this outrage from happening?”
“According to the latest summary of social housing needs assessments, 61,000 households are on council waiting lists, although we know a large number of them are single people. About 49,000 households at the end of last year were on HAP, while there were about 7,500 private sector RAS recipients of the 14,000.”
“We are setting out five specific sets of circumstances where that would be permissible. Under our scheme, the person moving from Youghal to Clonakilty would have to have a specific reason like taking up a job or education in Clonakilty or accessing long-term medical treatment, etc.”
“First, importantly it would be for both people on the list and people in receipt of social housing support, such as HAP and RAS. It is not just the 61,000 households on our council lists but also the 55,000 or so households in HAP or private sector RAS.”
“Sure. I thank the Minister of State for his reply. My natural disposition as a person is to treat people at face value, but ten years in this House has made a bit of a cynic of me.”
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“The Minister can have all of the nice catchphrases and soundbites he likes, but he is the man in charge. He is the person who can actually bring forward the proposals to dramatically increase and accelerate not just the total output of social and affordable homes, but the number of those homes that are taken from vacant and derelict stock. He is the man who, once and for all, could actually finally reform the vacant property refurbishment grant to make it fully fit for purpose. He is the man who could introduce the CPO reform legislation to make it quicker and more cost effective for local authorities and State agencies to access those properties. Yes, he has some years to go yet in office, but so far, in his first year in office, I see nothing whatsoever from him that is going to address vacancy and dereliction this year.”
“He has made it clear that this is not going to tackle all of the problems, but in the meantime - during the two or three years while the Minister and his colleagues are dithering and not introducing a Revenue-collected tax - this would at least force local authorities to put on record what the Minister says are their failures, and then allow us to force him to do something about those. It seems to me what the Minister is saying in respect of the derelict sites tax is, at some point in the future it will be there, but in the meantime, he is accepting the status quo . That is what I am hearing on this side of the House. The fact that this is the position the Minister has taken, and he is not even willing to accept and work with my good colleague's Bill, tells me he is not serious about this.”
“We also need a single vacant and derelict property tax - a punitive vacant and derelict property tax - that is actually applied and collected as a matter of urgency. How can the Minister stand there and expect us to take him seriously when he says he is going to wage a war on dereliction but just not right now, next year or probably not even the year after that? That is the kind of war that anybody who tried to wage it would lose and would lose immediately. Deputy Gould has been very upfront.”
“This State should be funding and delivering in the region of 25,000 social, affordable rental and affordable purchase homes each year, more than double what is currently being produced. There should be targets within local authorities for a percentage of those homes to come from vacant and derelict stock. To do that, the Government would have to reform the way in which it funds local authorities to tackle vacancy and dereliction. Currently the Department does not provide funding to a local authority that wants to buy a vacant or derelict property through CPO and refurbish it to bring it back into use. On top of that, the Minister's predecessor and his predecessor before him promised to reform CPO legislation, which is completely unfit for purpose and unable to tackle the issues at hand.”
“It is pretty disingenuous to dismiss legislation by an Opposition Member because it is not dealing with the totality of vacancy and dereliction. The Minister knows as well as I do that we cannot bring Bills here that place a charge on the State. He also knows, as he does often as Minister, that small, sensible propositions can be very effective while addressing the broader issues. Let us just look at the broader issues to remind him what Sinn Féin's policy is on the areas beyond Deputy Gould's proposals. First, at the very centre of our alternative approach to tackling dereliction and vacancy is putting tackling it at the very centre of public housing provision.”
“I do not believe a cent of that tax will be collected until 2028 based on previous experience. How many will actually pay it? On the evidence of the mishandling of the vacant property tax, we could have a situation where not only is it delayed for a long period, but many of those who should be paying it do not. In his speech, the Minister listed a whole series of other initiatives - initiatives that have been around for a long period. Sure, they make small incremental changes in some locations, but in terms of tackling vacancy and dereliction with the ambition and the scale that is required, the Minister is simply repeating the same propositions as his predecessors. That is why, on this side of the House, there is such scepticism.”
“Finally, people are now able to draw it down, although significantly, that scheme still excludes huge numbers of people who have applied and have been approved because payments are not made on a stage basis - a key reform of the scheme we have urged the Government to take. When we eventually got to see the vacant property tax, this actually was not going to be a meaningful tax collected by Revenue on the tens of thousands vacant homes across the State. As Deputy Gould has outlined, the actual number of property owners being charged this tax is tiny and the level of the tax is very low. That is why many of us treat with great scepticism the proposal by the Government to transfer the derelict sites levy to Revenue for derelict sites tax. It is not just that the Minister is delaying it. In fact, I think Deputy Gould is being generous to him.”
“In effect, they have been abject failures. When Eoghan Murphy became Minister, following a very sensible proposal from former Deputy Fergus O'Dowd, he was asked by Leo Varadkar to investigate the idea of a vacant property tax. He studied the idea and came back with proposals, but he was told by Leo and Paschal that it could not proceed. Again, Eoghan Murphy's record as Minister in bringing back the tens of thousands of vacant and derelict homes that lie idle across the State was an abysmal failure. Then Darragh O'Brien arrived. Again, the record is very poor. The only major initiative he announced was the vacant property refurbishment grant. It took three years to get up and running. They had to change the rules of the scheme on three separate occasions.”
“I have learned the hard way not to take those promises at face value and to judge people on the basis of delivery. The difficulty after a decade of having had four Ministers and four housing plans is that the record of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael in terms of tackling vacancy and dereliction is, quite frankly, appalling. I do not believe the Minister said anything that is going to make that difference. Simon Coveney had an entire pillar of his housing plan in 2016 dedicated to vacancy and dereliction. He introduced a plethora of new initiatives, including buy and renew, repair and lease and the rolling Housing Agency fund, all of which were abysmal failures in terms of the promises he made regarding bringing back into use the quantum of vacant and derelict homes. Those initiatives continue to exist and limp on ineffectively.”
“I commend my colleague Deputy Gould on bringing forward this very simple but sensible legislation. Leaving homes derelict in the middle of the deepest housing crisis in the modern history of the State is akin to hoarding food during a famine. This is a comment that I and many other Members of this House have made repeatedly. I note with some interest the language the Minister has started to use with respect to dereliction. He has used it again here by using terms like "antisocial behaviour" and "war on dereliction". In a recent interview, he stated that if he had his way, he would make dereliction a crime. The problem I have is that I have been on this side of the Chamber for a decade and this is the fourth Minister with responsibility for housing to make these type of promises regarding dereliction.”
“That is something the Minister could do as a matter of urgency. There are many other issues that I will raise, but I will finish on this. Water is a fundamental human right. It is essential to the well-being of people, families and communities. It must be delivered by a public utility, free at the point of delivery, on the basis of need. We are not there yet. Sinn Féin will continue to make the case for those reforms. The Government is not doing enough, and it is a pity the Minister did not acknowledge that in his remarks.”
“However, we also have over 400 housing estates that still have legacy issues arising from Celtic tiger era relating to developer-provided infrastructure, primarily in rural communities. The Government is not providing sufficient funding to the utility and local authorities to address all of those. The Minister rightly mentioned that there were challenges and inadequacies in Uisce Éireann's communication with communities and elected representatives, particularly with local councillors, and especially in those areas, whether Cork, Donegal or elsewhere, where we are seeing some of the most significant challenges. There is a solution to that. We need to have a statutory requirement on the utility to engage in a structured manner with elected representatives and local authorities, as well as with these Houses.”
“We also have significant EU infringement proceedings against the State for failures to transpose and, crucially, comply with both the urban wastewater treatment directive and the drinking water directive. In fact, the most recent of those infringement proceedings was initiated last year while Deputy Browne was the Minister in charge. While the number of wastewater treatment plants pouring raw sewage into our rivers, lakes and seas has reduced, it is still unacceptably high. The Minister's failure to provide sufficient capital funding and planning reforms is delaying the ability of the utility to address those. There are also very significant legacy issues. We have already heard about the slow pace of addressing leakage, both in urban and rural Ireland, within the existing system.”
“When we were dealing with the Planning and Development Bill with the Minister's predecessor, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, the utilities, including Uisce Éireann, made a very strong and compelling case to the committee that there needed to be a number of key reforms to the planning system to expedite those increased treatment facilities. We need to prioritise critical infrastructure. We need to have parallel consenting and planning approvals, and dramatic increases in staffing, both for the Planning and Environment Court and for our planning authorities. When we tabled amendments to that Bill, the Minister's party and his predecessor opposed them. Now, here we are, two years later, and the Minister is saying he is thinking about introducing the very same crucial planning reforms that we proposed over two years ago.”
“The Minister talked about significant increases in funding, but what he failed to mention, of course, was that Uisce Éireann came to the Government over two years ago seeking very significant increases in capital expenditure to meet the demand for increased water and wastewater treatment facilities in urban and rural Ireland. The Government delayed for over two years, but still today, despite the big announcement at the budget, it is unclear how much money is going to be available, when it is going to be available and for what projects.”
“I listened very carefully to the Minister's contribution, and I have to say it was somewhat disappointing. There is no doubt that many aspects of our drinking water and wastewater systems work, and work well. I want to put on record that there have been improvements in recent years in parts of the country in the operation of the utility. However, as the Minister has heard from the Deputies proposing the motion, and as he will hear from my colleagues, there are many parts of this country where our water and wastewater treatment services are not working adequately. While the focus of this debate is on Uisce Éireann, much of the responsibility for those failures lies in fact with the Government.”
“I urge the Minister of State to ensure that he communicate back to the Minister, Deputy O'Brien, the need for him to make a clear public statement as a matter of urgency that the funding will be released and work will start once procurement is finished in order that the working public, the school and college-going public, and people who want to go in and out of Dublin city centre for leisure or recreation activities will be able to get a DART every 12 minutes from Adamstown, Kishoge and Clondalkin train stations by 2030, which they were promised by the previous Government and should be guaranteed by this Government.”
“What the hardworking tax-paying people of Dublin Mid-West and the surrounding areas deserve is for Deputy Darragh O'Brien to honour the commitment that was made to them and to others by his predecessor, Eamon Ryan, and revisit the funding allocation, ensure the funding is provided immediately once the procurement issues are agreed and get the work done. That is what is required. There is no explanation as to why the change and no explanation as to why there is now a potential five-year delay. I note that the Minister of State has given some glimmer of hope at the end that some funding decisions may be reversed.”
“Virtually nothing that the Minister of State said has not already been communicated to me and other Deputies in the constituency by way of parliamentary questions. It does not address the central question. Right now, people who live in Adamstown, Lucan and Clondalkin desperately need the high-frequency DART service into and out of the city centre to be delivered, as was originally promised, by 2030. Nobody understands why, when the NDP expenditure plan was published in November, no funding was allocated for DART+ South West until after 2030. It makes no sense whatsoever.”
“I also hope he can relay the concerns, not just of myself and my constituents in Dublin Mid-West but of people in Dublin and Kildare as well, that the decision to delay the funding and delivery of this project needs to be reversed and brought back on track, if the Minister of State will excuse the pun, to be delivered on time by 2030.”
“Since the news was announced in November I have written repeatedly to the Minister by way of parliamentary questions urging him not just to provide an update but to reverse that decision and ensure that commencement of this vital public transport project starts as a matter of urgency and is completed on time. To give a sense of the scale of this, currently the train line through this portion of my constituency carries about 5,000 passengers per hour. The proposition of DART+ South West is to increase that to 20,000 passengers per hour in both directions so the scale of the need can be seen. I look forward to the Minister of State's response.”
“The Minister of State can imagine the shock of people living in those communities when they heard from the new Minister for Transport, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, in November of last year when the detail of the national development plan, NDP, expenditure programme was released that in fact work now will not commence until 2030 and will not necessarily be complete until as late as 2036. It is a very clear breach of what had been committed to by the Government previously. It is a breach, in my opinion, of the legally binding phasing agreements of the strategic development zones in those two locations. Also and crucially, it is simply no good for people who need to get to and from work and young people who need to get to and from school or college daily.”
“Somebody who has recently decided to rent or buy in Adamstown, or in Seven Mills in Clonburris and is looking to get a train into Dublin city or home during peak time simply cannot do so because by the time it reaches Dublin from the commuter belt it will be full and there will not even be standing room. Likewise, BusConnects, an important project for the redesign of bus networks in Dublin, was blind to and continues to play catch up with the strategic development zones. When Eamon Ryan was Minister for Transport, he gave a commitment that the crucial DART+ South West project to electrify the line through my constituency - from Clondalkin, Kishoge and Adamstown to Hazelhatch - would commence in 2025 and be completed in 2030.”
“As those residential developments are being built out, a number of Government Departments simply are not ensuring the adequate provision of facilities such as school places, doctors, dentists and, particularly, public transport. One of the lessons we thought had been learned, particularly in the context of strategic development zones that have clear, legally binding phasing agreements for the delivery of homes, is that infrastructure, amenities and, crucially, public transport, should be delivered in parallel with the homes. Unfortunately, that is not happening today.”
“One of the great mistakes of the Government during the Celtic tiger era was the failure to ensure that when new homes were being delivered, adequate infrastructure services and public amenities were provided. This was an issue that affected every county in the State. While today there is no doubt that not enough homes are being delivered and particularly not enough social and affordable homes, unfortunately in many constituencies including my own when new homes are being built the Government is repeating the mistakes of the Celtic tiger period. I represent Dublin Mid-West. We have two very large strategic development zones in Adamstown and Clonburris.”
“Will he please make sure the enthusiasm of the Minister of State, who I know, has good intentions on this issue, is curbed a bit so our committee is not asked to do anything in future, in official communications from the Minister or his juniors, that is outside of Standing Orders? I do not think anybody in this House would see any of those requests as unreasonable.”
“I have no doubt that there was a level of enthusiasm, shall I say, by the Minister of State to get these through but as a consequence of that, and, ultimately, the Minister is responsible for the actions of his junior Ministers, things took place that should not have. That meant that additional committee and Oireachtas time was required, and unnecessary delay could have been caused by his Department. I appeal to the Minister to ensure nothing like this happens again with any of the other modules of exempted development regulations. If something requires environmental assessment, the Department should wait for the environmental assessment to be complete and it should give us the regulation in completed form.”
“We were then informed by way of a letter from the Minister of State that there was going to be a need for significant amendments to the agricultural exempted development regulations. In a move completely unprecedented in my decade in the Dáil, the Minister requested our committee to do something that, on foot of legal advice, we deemed not to be in line with Standing Orders and effectively illegal. He requested that we overturn a decision of the Oireachtas. The consequence of all of this is that the Minister and the Government may not meet their deadline of the end of this year for the over-the-shop exempted development regulations, which would have been an absolute disaster. The reason I am saying this here is because there is going to be a series of other exempted development regulations coming before our committee.”
“Sinn Féin will be supporting both sets of exempted development regulations. They are modest and reasonable and, in our view, they are sensible. We have no issue with them proceeding. However, I will put on the record of the Dáil my deep dissatisfaction at the manner in which the Minister has processed these regulations. As Members will know, this is the second time these regulations have been brought before the committee and the House in the space of a few short weeks. They were originally presented as a single regulation. When the Minister of State responsible came before the committee, he explained that, because the environmental assessment had not been completed, he might have to bring the regulations back in a revised form.”
“Does he at least accept that there were inflationary impacts on the prices that people had to pay for works prior to that date from some point in 2023 up to but before 29 March 2024 and therefore people will be left out of pocket because of this deadline?”
“I do not know how far back the Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland went - if it went back to the setting of the cap in the 2022 Bill or to the opening date of the scheme in 2023. Perhaps the Minister can provide us with the rationale as to why somebody who may have had some works done in February 2024, January 2024 or December 2023 should not be treated in exactly the same way as people at a later stage. It may well be that the inflation impact for them was less than for people after that date and therefore the amount of additional grant uplift they will need will be less; we do not know. However, it seems to be a completely arbitrary proposition that it is the date the Minister received the report. I ask the Minister to explain the rationale for allowing that date to be the date.”
“Some of those people would have had works done prior to the date of 29 March 2024. However, those works would have been more expensive because of construction sector inflation from the period of the 2022 legislation. I understand that the Minister received the report in March 2024, but that report was looking at construction sector inflation as it impacted in these counties for a period prior to that report. I cannot remember if the report was commissioned in December 2023, January 2024 or February 2024, but the Society of Chartered Surveyors would have been looking back into 2023 as part of that exercise. It seems to make no sense whatsoever to set a date of when the report was received when it was actually examining construction sector inflation for a period prior to that.”
“The Minister has not explained the reason for the date. Let me just emphasise the chronology here. When Darragh O'Brien rushed through the legislation in 2022, the expectation was it would take some time for the regulations for the revised scheme to be completed. The Minister was crystal clear that he did not want homeowners to wait until the new regulations were introduced and therefore he gave a public commitment that if they proceeded to apply for inclusion in the original scheme, when the regulations for the new scheme became live they could transition to it and they would be no worse off. So, on the word of the Minister and the Government, in 2022 people would have continued to apply under the old scheme. When the new regulations came in in 2023, they would have transitioned onto that scheme.”
“Otherwise, the consequence will be that a significant group of homeowners will be significantly out of pocket because the Government is simply not backdating the increased cost as a result of inflation in accordance with an appropriate timeframe.”
“We teased this out with the Minister’s officials at a meeting of the housing committee and they could not provide any credible justification for why the date was included other than that it was, if I remember correctly, the date on which the SCSI report was concluded. However, that report was considering inflation over a much longer period, from 2023 onwards. I appeal to the Minister to provide in his response either a better justification for the cut-off point than we have received to date or an undertaking that between now and the taking of the Bill in the Seanad, he will revisit this matter and either introduce flexibility or remove the date.”
“The consequence of having this arbitrary date, and it is arbitrary, is that there will be a significant number of homeowners who will have undertaken remediation, or portions thereof, prior to that date, and they will have been paying prices significantly higher than suggested by the original SCSI report that informed the cap in the legislation in 2022. For this reason, many of us on this side of the House simply cannot support this legislation. It is creating another very serious inequality. No affected homeowner should be left behind. Any affected homeowner who has experienced construction-sector inflation since the setting of the cap should be able to avail of this.”
“Where somebody applies for the increased grant and that grant is awarded, it can be paid out only on qualifying expenditure, and that, according to the subsection, means "expenditure, in carrying out works to satisfy the approved remediation option, incurred by the relevant owner after the date of the notification referred to in subsection (1)(a), but not earlier than 29 March 2024". Almost everybody on this side of the House tabled amendments to remove that. I fully understand that this places a charge on the State and therefore, under Standing Orders, it is ruled out of order. I anticipated that. However, this is a really crucial section of the legislation and there is simply no justification for the date 29 March 2024 because construction sector inflation started in 2023, featuring through to the end of 2023 and into 2024.”
“A core principle of the scheme was that nobody would be disadvantaged either from transitioning or applying. At the end of 2023 and in early 2024, the then Minister, Deputy Darragh O’Brien, requested the SCSI to conduct an updated assessment of the potential costings. That work, I understand, concluded in March 2024 and some updated work was done until August. The agreement in principle from the Government to introduce this legislation was then agreed. The problem is that the final subsection of section 8 refers to qualifying expenditure.”
“I fully support the amendments, but I would like to make a comment on the section before we proceed. We have spent the past three and a half hours dealing with a wide range of deficiencies within the scheme, but section 8 is the substantive element of the legislation. It relates to the application for an increase to the remediation option grant. That is something for which people on this side of the House, particularly those from the impacted counties, have been making the case for quite some time. It is important for us to remember the timeline. Legislation was rushed through the Dáil in the summer of 2022. It took a year for the regulations to be drafted, but the cap was set in the legislation in 2022. People started applying to the new scheme in 2023 and transitioning from the original scheme during that period.”
“Without repeating the same argument, it would be helpful if the officials could produce a briefing note on how this is going to work that could be shared with the Oireachtas housing committee, for example. The committee members could share it with their colleagues. I am not at all clear how and against what criteria it will operate. It is clear the Minister is not going to give us that information here. That is fine but even a short briefing note from the officials explaining how they envisage this measure will work in real time would be very helpful and welcome.”
“That seems to be what the Minister of State is saying but that is not what I am reading. If that is the case, on what grounds is the Housing Agency going to be able to overturn the original decision not to award a grant for remediation? How flexible will that flexibility be? We need more explanation of how this will actually work in real time rather than just a general statement around flexibility for us to determine how, if at all, this will be helpful for the type of homeowners Deputies Mac Lochlainn and Charles Ward spoke about.”
“My question is kind of the same as the first time. The Minister of State said this provides greater flexibility and it will effectively allow for the bypassing of that damage threshold. Will the Minister of State try to give us an explanation of how that is going to work? Having read this amendment four or five times, I am not clear. Is the Minister of State saying that if there are two homes side by side and both have applied for inclusion in the scheme, and one has been awarded a grant but the other has not because they have not met the damage threshold, there will now be a mechanism by which they can apply through the local authority or the Housing Agency for the damage threshold to be deemed to have been met when it was not originally and therefore both homes can be remediated?”
“I am not at all clear on what this amendment does and its relevance for a semi-detached dwelling, for example, where one dwelling is deemed to be awarded a grant the other has previously not been. It might be helpful if the Minister were to try and explain in plain English, particularly in a case where you have attached or semi-detached dwellings, what this amendment is trying to do. Obviously, as Deputy Mac Lochlainn outlined, this is a very significant issue. It is one where we have had examples in Mayo, Donegal and elsewhere. For the sake of clarity, if the Minister could talk us through, what are the implications of the proposition for this request for one of the relevant dwellings that does not meet the damage threshold and how does this operate in real time?”
“I move amendment No. 7: In page 5, between lines 26 and 27, to insert the following: “Report on barriers to inclusion in scheme 2. Within three months of the passing of this Act the Minister shall lay before both Houses of the Oireachtas a report examining barriers to full inclusion of affected homeowners and others in the scheme including: (a) the operation of the damage threshold; (b) the issue of semi-detached properties; (c) the issue of side-by-side remediation; (d) the issue of retrospective payments. The report shall set out recommendations for reform of the defective concrete block scheme to remove these barriers.”.”
“I move amendment No. 6: In page 5, between lines 26 and 27, to insert the following: “Report on legislative changes necessary for end-to-end remediation scheme 2. Within three months of the passing of this Act the Minister shall lay before both Houses of the Oireachtas a report detailing the necessary changes to primary and secondary legislation to allow for the operation of an end-to-end remediation scheme for all those impacted by defective concrete blocks and related building materials.”.”
“For these reasons, we recommend all three of these amendments to ensure the Minister takes on the task of investigating coming up with credible solutions to problems that were identified back in 2022 when we tabled amendments to rectify those. The Minister's predecessor did not listen. We are hoping the Minister will listen on this occasion.”
“Even with the partial increase in the grant cap for those who will be able to avail of it - there are exclusions and we will come to those on section 8 - without these more fundamental changes, raising the grant will not benefit the vast majority of people who are currently locked out, excluded or unable to utilise this scheme and they will continue to be left behind. This is an issue of equity and fairness. If people affected by pyrite in Leinster received 100% redress with an end-to-end scheme and appropriate ancillary grants, I can see no reason the Government can justify treating the people of Donegal, Mayo, Clare, Limerick, Sligo and other potentially impacted counties, including Fingal, as we discussed earlier, from exactly the same treatment. Right now, they are not getting equity, fairness or redress.”
“Again, while we have solutions to that, we cannot table them because they would place a charge on the State. Therefore, we want the Minister to examine these issues in a timely manner, based on the real, lived experience of homeowners in Donegal, Mayo, Clare, Limerick and Sligo, and come back with recommendations to change them. To conclude on this grouping, if the Minister does not deal, during his term of office, with these fundamental flaws to both the original scheme and the revised scheme of the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, the scheme will continue to fail.”
“As regards the damage threshold, if we are serious about having a scheme that is based on the science, as other Deputies have said, it should not be based on a visual inspection but on the actual scientific evidence of the extent of sulphate attack in the deleterious material, based on engineers' reports and laboratory testing. Likewise, while some of what is now in this amendment is being addressed by way of amendments brought forward by the Minister, the continued absence of staged payments, for example, means that unless people have access to bridging finance or capital of their own, even with the offer of a grant, they may not have the capital to undertake the works and, therefore, will be unable to proceed with the remediation.”
“It is a completely ludicrous proposition and we know, from talking to affected homeowners, that it has also led to a significant increase in prices being charged by building contractors and building materials suppliers. An end -to-end scheme is much more sensible. Again, we cannot propose an end-to-end scheme because it would be ruled out of order in accordance with Standing Orders. The purpose of this amendment is, therefore, to require the Minister to examine the merits of such a scheme and bring forward propositions to address it. The final amendment in this group, amendment No. 7, looks at the other barriers. There are some listed in the amendment but there are more beyond that.”