The rip-off rent hike Bill before us today is without doubt the most profound change to the regulation of the private rental sector in over a decade. Much more significant than that, at the core of this Bill, is nothing short of a vicious financial assault on private renters who are already living in the most expensive and insecure form of housing in the State. The consequence of this legislation over a relatively short period of time will be significantly increased financial hardship for renters; more and more people locked out of an overpriced private rental sector, forced to move back in with their parents, or indeed emigrate; and, crucially, significant increases in homelessness, plus family homelessness, including children. That is what is actually being proposed here today. At the very heart of this legislation is a profound transformation in how rents are set - the market reset. As the Minister knows, the current rule is when one tenant moves out and another tenant moves in, the new rent is based on inflation or 2%, whichever is the lower. What is being proposed here from the beginning of March is that when one tenant moves out and another tenant moves in, at the start of the tenancy, in the overwhelming majority of cases, a landlord will be able to reset the rent to market rent. While RPZs will continue over the next six years, at the end of that six-year tenancy if the tenant remains, market reset will happen again. What this means is that from 1 March, thousands upon thousands of renters are going to be hit by the market reset. What is the average length of a tenancy currently in the private rental sector? It is three and a half years according to the Residential Tenancies Board. A quarter of all tenancies registered annually are new first-time tenancies. What that means is that if those two trends continue, within a matter of months up to 60,000 tenancies could be affected each and every single year. Within four to six years the overwhelming majority of private renters in this State will be captured by the market reset rule. That is what the Minister is proposing. He will not explain it properly to people. He will not be straight with renters but that is what he is proposing. The big question this Government wants to hide from is how much extra this is going to cost those renters? If you make a very simple calculation using the data from the Residential Tenancies Board of new and existing rents, the average additional rent to be charged by a renter captured by the market reset in a year would be €3,000. That is €3,000 extra in rent that the Minister is imposing on those renters. In fact, because the RPZs have had a bigger effect outside Dublin, the impact in the first year alone will be an extra €3,500 in rent. In Galway city, where the gap is the largest, the Minister is proposing to allow landlords to charge up to an additional €4,500 in rent a year for a new first-time tenancy commencing in March onwards. I do not understand how the Minister and the Minister of State can describe that as fair or balanced. I will say it again: what that means is that within the course of 12 months, up to 60,000 tenancies - many more renters in those tenancies - will be paying thousands upon thousands of extra euro in rent each year. Many of them will be first-time renters in September. The majority of students live in the mainstream private rental sector and not student-specific accommodation. They are going to be hit very hard. If that is not a vicious assault on renters in the private rental sector, I do not know what is. It is the death knell of the most modest and ill-conceived rent pressure zone regulation that I can imagine but one for which renters are going to pay dearly. The Minister will of course say that tenants who remain in their existing tenancies will not be impacted but what that ignores is the level of churn in the private rental sector. It also ignores the very difficult decisions that renters are now going to face because of this change. Will they put off having children? Will they put off taking up a job or educational opportunity? Will they have to continue to live in inadequate, overcrowded and unsuitable accommodation for fear of paying those extra rents? That is the real choice the Minister, Deputy Browne, and his Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, and Independent colleagues in government are forcing on renters. To make matters even worse, the Minister is proposing a level of complexity both in rent setting and tenure rules that is just perplexing. There are going to be five different sets of rent-setting rules. How anybody thinks that is a credible form of rent regulation is beyond me. There will be four different sets of tenure rules. I accept that tenants in properties owned by larger landlords will have increased security of tenure but security of tenure is no damn good if you cannot afford the rent. The Minister is giving with one hand while he is taking away - with a gut punch - with the other. This is really hard to explain to people. Even the Minister of State, Deputy Cummins, struggled to generate any level of understanding while reading his script. It is going to be much harder to understand and virtually impossible to enforce. The Residential Tenancies Board is already struggling with the significant caseload that it has, and the level of complexity and confusion being proposed here is going to make the board's job much more difficult. For the percentage of landlords out there who will break the rules or play fast and loose with the rules, this will make their job much easier. Of course, none of this should surprise us. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have an incredibly bad track record when it comes to regulating the private rental sector. They blocked rent certainty in 2015. They made a mess of rent caps in 2016. Over the past decade they have introduced a dizzying array of changes to the Residential Tenancies Act. They ended the ban on no-fault evictions in 2023. That is the reason our private rental sector is so damn dysfunctional. It is because of those parties and their bad policies. The Bill before us today is no different. Their rent-setting proposals have been sharply criticised by tenants' advocates. The tenure rules are being opposed by small and medium sized landlords. It appears that even some builders are unhappy with the proposals. That begs the question: why has the Minister done this? Why is this even in front of us today? The answer is very simple - it is because Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, along with their Independent supporters, have been captured by the big institutional investors. The funds lobbied aggressively for the market reset and when the funds tell Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael to jump, their parties ask "How high?" That is exactly what has happened in this instance. The tragedy of this is that they have been sold a pup. Contrary to what the Minister claims, this legislation is not going to see a significant increase in investment or in the delivery of private rental sector homes. I accept we will get some increase in high-end, high-density, high-rental accommodation in parts of Dublin and maybe the docklands of Cork but it is not going to increase the supply of social, affordable or privately owned homes and it is certainly not going to reduce rents in the short, medium or long term. The only guarantee from this legislation is rip-off rents are going to be hiked ever higher for an ever greater number of renters, many of whom cannot afford them. Of course, there is an alternative. The Minister should be here in front of us today introducing legislation to cut and freeze rents, introducing budgets to dramatically increase and accelerate the delivery of social and genuinely affordable homes and supporting proposals from Sinn Féin and others to activate the small and medium-sized private residential development sector to deliver more good quality homes for working people to buy but, instead, he is shafting renters and lining the pockets of big institutional investors and large corporate landlords. For the Minister not even to acknowledge the dramatic impact that the market reset is going to have on tens of thousands of renters is, quite frankly, not only dishonest but shameful. On those grounds, the fact that, because institutional investors have demanded it of him, he is going to allow 60,000 renters pay thousands of euro extra in rent every year is the reason we will oppose this Bill, today, tomorrow and every other day in the short time he is giving us to deal with it here in the Oireachtas.

Sentiment score: -0.04