Minister should rethink proposal to remove 'no fault eviction' safety net

Minister for Housing, James Browne, has proposed changes to the ‘Tenant in situ’ scheme which, while he presents them as ‘refocusing on families’ and ‘new funding’, in reality, will take away the safety net from people facing homelessness due to ‘no-fault evictions. Focus Ireland has written to the Minister, asking him to reconsider the proposal.

This proposal is just the latest episode in a long series in which Governments have decided that people facing no-fault evictions are not high on their agenda. Almost a decade ago, Focus Ireland research identified ‘evict-to-sell’ as one of the largest causes of homelessness (https://bit.ly/FIInsights4). On the basis of this we argued for the extension of the “tenant not effected by sale” provisions found in commercial lettings to residential tenancies. A legislative amendment, drafted on a pro-bono basis by a Focus Ireland supporter, was proposed in the Dail on a number of occasions, as ‘the Focus Ireland amendment.’  The Government of the day opposed the amendment as ‘unconstitutional’, or just voted it down with no reasons given. Constitutional objections evaporated during the pandemic when Government adopted a similar approach on an ad hoc and temporary basis, letting it lapse and then reintroducing a similar measure again in the pandemic aftermath when homelessness began to rise rapidly again.

After months of dithering, which in itself caused untold damage to landlord and tenant confidence, the Government decided finally to abandon its ‘no-fault eviction moratorium’. Reacting to the fears of homeless organisations that this would result in a rapid increase in homelessness as landlords decided to sell up, the Government  scrambled to announce a ‘safety net’: this of the Tenant in Situ scheme under which local authorities could purchase the homes of tenants who were facing homelessness due to their landlord deciding to sell up.

The scheme worked. In fact, homelessness did rise rapidly after the removal of the ‘Evictions-to-sell’ moratoria, but this increase would have been much greater without the TiS. While arguing that there were better and more consistent ways of approaching these issues, Focus Ireland welcomed the TiS and actively participated in working with local authorities to implement the scheme until the funding mechanism was concentrated in the SHiP funding line, so limiting the scheme to local authorities.

Focus Ireland expressed concern that the targets announced by the then Minister Darragh O’Brien did not match the scale of the problem that we were seeing (and what was being recorded by the RTB). Minister O’Brien responded that the figures were not a ceiling but a floor and that he expected local authorities to achieve more if they could.

Within its limitations, this has been a successful scheme, saving over a thousand households from homelessness, resulting in significant savings for the Department of Housing in providing emergency homeless accommodation.

Regrettably, the announcement last week appears to us to make a number of very detrimental changes which will undermine the scheme and needlessly increase the number of people becoming homeless:

• The decision to exclude properties where the landlord has failed to register with the RTB would penalise vulnerable tenants for the behaviour of their landlord. In contrast, the RTB legislation ensures that tenants’ rights are not undermined by the failure of their landlord to register, so this proposal goes directly against the spirit of the law.
• The proposal to exclude rental properties which have been less than two years in the social housing support system shifts the focus of the scheme away from the vulnerability of the tenant towards arbitrary considerations about the tenancy. It is impossible to see what policy goal this change is designed to achieve, other than the exclusion of a number of vulnerable people.
• No rationale is given for the decision to exclude single adult tenants from the scheme, and while protecting families with children is a welcome priority, it is misleading to characterise as proposal as ‘prioritising families’ just because it excludes single people – not one single family will benefit from this new proposal that would not benefit from the existing scheme, indeed many families that would have benefited will be excluded. With adequate funding, all households at risk of homelessness through evict-to-sell can be protected.
• The proposal to abolish funding for refurbishment costs for properties which fall below a suitable standard will significantly reduce the number of eligible at risk tenant. In our analysis of the TiS properties that were handled by Focus Housing in the early stages of this scheme, which was shared with your officials, accessing funds to refurbish below standard properties emerged as the biggest barrier to the scheme’s success. We recommended more finance should be made available for this, to reflect the poor standard of upkeep of rental properties in the segment of the rental market most effected by evictions to sell. The consequence of this new restriction is that families will be made homeless simply on the basis that the only home they could find to rent had not been adequately maintained by their landlord.

In understanding the scheme, it is important to recognise that there is no advantage to landlords in selling to local authorities rather than selling on the open market, they do not get a higher price and it takes far longer than selling on the open market. The reason for the scheme is that it is in the public interest to prevent people from becoming homeless when their landlord wants to sell up. Landlords participate though some sort of personal concern about their tenants or a more general social responsibility. The new guidelines on the other hand appear to imagine a situation in which landlords are trying to sell to the state and must be dissuaded from doing so. By making the scheme explicitly a ‘scheme of last resort’, the proposed changes make it a longer and less attractive proposition for landlords.  The implicit message appears to be that Government policy favours the vacant-possession sale on the market rather than the protection of the existing tenant.

This perception is reinforced by the apparent decision to lower the ‘targets’ for local authorities and to withdraw the previous assurance that it was ‘not a ceiling but a floor’.

Behind this decision appears to be a Government pre-occupation with balancing the interests of tenants at risk of homelessness against the interests of households that would become owner-occupiers by purchasing from departing landlords. In this view, every family saved from homelessness is one less opportunity for owner-occupiers. The new proposals shift that balance entirely away from concern about homelessness and effectively withdraws the ‘safety net’ put in place by the previous Government. Focus Ireland has written to the Minister, calling on him to reconsider these proposals which will just make the homeless crisis even worse.

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