Recommendations will lead to rise in ‘ghettoisation’

THE adoption of the McCarthy report recommendations on local authority housing will lead to increased “ghettoisation” and only provide homes for the permanently poor, according to the Labour Party.

Labour local authority spokesman Ciarán Lynch told the Irish Examiner he opposed the recommendation in the report that local authority “tenancies should be reviewed periodically, at a minimum at five-year intervals, and the housing needs of tenants reassessed, regardless of income or family circumstances”.

He added: “The report goes on to suggest that local authority tenants should not have the right to hold a tenancy for a particular abode for their lifetime. This approach is deeply problematic as we have learned from our experience of social housing policies of the 1980s. At that time, tenants whose financial situation had improved, were incentivised to move out of their council-owned homes. The result of this was that in some areas, only those people on the lowest of incomes and with the most serious of financial and social problems, remained as tenants, creating a policy of virtual ghettoisation.”

He said that in the long run such an approach resulted in greater costs for the taxpayer.

In the local authority area the report recommends the axing of all the country’s 49 town councils and that city and county councils be cut from 34 down to 22.

The Association of County and City Councils said a case could be made for combining a city and county council in the one county but there was little sense in merging local authorities from different counties.