Last week, the Oireachtas Housing and Homelessness Committee heard from FLAC’s Senior Policy Analyst Paul Joyce, Legal and Policy Officer Ciaran Finlay and PILA’s Legal Officer Eithne Lynch on how the State might avert the threat of homelessness to 30,000 households in long-term mortgage arrears, as well as the need for adequate legal supports and avenues for remedying their housing complaints.
According to Mr Joyce, the number of more intractable arrears cases is not being addressed quickly enough. “FLAC believes there is at present an over-reliance on arrears capitalisation and split mortgages as permanent restructuring arrangements, at the expense of other options such as debt write-down and term extensions. This may feed into the homelessness crisis for some people both now and far into the future, given the higher financial pressures of these options for over-indebted borrowers,” he stated.
“The increased rate of repossession applications in our courts also indicate than rather that being a way to get people to cooperate with lenders, such proceedings are becoming by default a way of resolving more intractable arrears cases,” he continued. While some repossessions are inevitable, FLAC believes that the playing field is still uneven between borrowers and lenders, and the Central Bank’s Code of Conduct on Mortgage Arrears, which is not broadly admissible in legal proceedings at present, should finally be made a regulation usable by borrowers in appealing lenders’ decisions on a payment arrangement proposal.
The organisation also called for the restoration of Mortgage Interest Supplement for those who suffer a short-term loss of income through illness or job loss. “At present there is no state support for households which suffer temporary setbacks making their mortgage interest payments unaffordable for that period. The reality is that if such households are forced into bankruptcy and homelessness, they will become a far greater burden on the state than through providing a time-limited income support,” stressed Ciaran Finlay.
PILA’s Legal Officer Eithne Lynch, updated the committee members on the ongoing collective housing complaint by local authority tenants to the European Committee of Social Rights. The complaint outlines appalling and widespread sub-standard housing issues across 20 Local Authority housing estates. The tenants were assisted by local housing rights groups and academics in forming the complaints and FLAC though its associate membership of international rights group FIDH lodged it with the Committee. A decision is expected before the end of 2016.
Click here to read the transcript of the hearing.
Click here for our previous article on the collective complaint.