Renting is far from a choice for most - Substandard rental properties

REMARKS made by Conor Skehan, chairman of the Housing Agency and the Government’s lead adviser on housing policy, may come back to haunt him.

“People are coming around to the idea that renting isn’t for losers and it remains a valid choice for many people,” Mr Skehan declared yesterday in advance of the publication of the agency’s annual report.

“Choice” is the operative word here but the fact is that, for thousands of families in Ireland, there really is no choice. If they are not unemployed or otherwise not eligible for a mortgage, they either pay increasing rents for substandard accommodation or end up on the streets.

Mr Skehan says he, himself, is living in a rented home and has no intention of changing that. That may be all very well for him if he is content to do that.

It is to be assumed that he is happy with his accommodation and does not have to contend with rat infestations, poor insulation, substandard wiring, dampness, leaking water pipes and a lack of ventilation faced by hundreds of families in Cork.

As the Irish Examiner’s report shows, Cork County Council sent out investigators from its private rental accommodation unit to inspect 729 individual properties last year and discovered that 682 of them failed to meet the required standards. That amounts to more than a 90% failure rate at a time when many families are facing increased rents without a concurrent increase in standards.

Ireland has, traditionally, been a nation of home owners, most families preferring to pay a mortgage in order to get on the property ladder rather than make monthly payments for a property they are never likely to own.

That has always made sense for a number of reasons – and still does.

With mortgage interest rates at an all-time low, the likelihood is that monthly payments to a bank or building society for the average family home is likely to be no greater than they would have to pay a landlord.

But for those trapped in the rental market, the reality is very different. There clearly are not enough inspectors to ensure that families do not have to endure Dickensian conditions imposed by rogue landlords. The situation in Cork is likely to be evidence of similar conditions nationwide.

The Cork County Council inspectors must be commended for the diligence they employed in carrying out their work, particularly in view of the fact that the council received a paltry €82,300 from the Department of the Environment to carry out a series of inspections.

That makes a mockery of the government standards for rented houses regulations, which are designed to ensure that minimum standards apply to rented accommodation.

Given that the Government will have to rely on a fair proportion of private rented accommodation to meet its ambitious housing targets, the least it can do is properly resource inspection teams in order to ensure that never again will renting a home be for losers.