Sir, – Fintan O'Toole is correct when he argues that the policy of "subsidising rents paid to private landlords" instead of "creating tangible assets" for the State by building social housing is fiscally perverse ("It is politically easier to keep spending on bad policies than to shift to good ones", Opinion & Analysis, January 28th). However, this is not the only example of fiscally perverse social housing policy.
When local authorities do provide social housing, tenants have the right to buy this housing for between 40 and 60 per cent of its market value. Since 1990, local authorities have provided an additional 90,000 social housing units, during the same period they have sold some 37,000 dwellings to tenants.
The asset values of these dwellings are not recorded in local authorities’ accounts so the full cost of this policy to the State is impossible to calculate, but the cost to households on waiting lists for social housing and to homeless people is very clear.
Fine Gael deserves credit for being the only political party which has proposed amending the right to buy council housing in the manifestos produced for this election. It has proposed reducing the discount tenant purchasers receive to 25 per cent of market value.
However, in the context of the severe shortage of social housing there is a strong argument for suspending the right to buy social housing entirely or selling dwellings at full market value and thereby providing local authorities with the funding needed to replace them. – Yours, etc,
Prof MICHELLE NORRIS,
School of Social Policy,
Social Work
and Social Justice,
University College Dublin,
Belfield,
Dublin 4.