Tipperary council housing rules slammed as ‘anti-family’ during heated debate
Tipperary County Council’s social housing allocation policy has been branded “anti-family,” with a local councillor arguing that current bedroom rules are leaving young families in cramped conditions.
Speaking during a heated debate about how the council allocates social housing to people on the housing list, and how people are restricted to properties that match their household size under council guidelines, independent councillor Liam Browne said housing rules meant people couldn’t add to their families.
For example, a single person or a couple with no children can only apply for a one-bedroom property, even if they are the joint carer of a child and would need a second bedroom.
At the February plenary meeting of Tipperary County Council, independent councillor Liam Browne said that the allocation rules were “anti-family”.
"We are putting young single parents into two-bedroom houses with two children, knowing full well that within a few years, they’re going to need a three-bedroom house, but they’re now stuck living in cramped conditions,” Cllr Browne said.
Under the council’s current rules, children of different genders can share a bedroom until they are 10 years old, but Cllr Browne says that if someone has both boys and girls who are under 10 at the time of being allocated a house, they should be allowed to move into a three-bedroom home because they will need it in a number of years anyway.
"We should be allowing them to go into a three-bedroom house in the first place, and allowing families to grow and encouraging families to grow, because the policy that we have, to my mind, it’s anti-family,” he said.
Housing issues are having a major impact on people’s decisions to have children or grow their families, the independent councillor said, adding that this would become a serious issue a few years down the line.
"Families can’t grow because they’re getting houses later in life, and they’re not able to afford the houses that are available, so can we help and allow people who are in two-bedrooms to move to three if they’re going to need it in a couple of years?” Cllr Browne asked.
"On the flip side of that, we now have a huge cohort of older people that grew up in social housing, who are single people in three-bedroom houses, and we don’t have two and one-bedroom properties for them to move into.
"We have a scheme in Cashel called St Patrick’s Gardens that allows people in three-bedroom houses to move down to two and one-beds, and I’m constantly having people coming to me, asking me can I help get them into that and free up the three-bedroom house,” he said.
Calling on Tipperary County Council to start providing more one and two-bedroom homes as part of their social housing deliveries, Cllr Browne said that this would make more three-bedroom properties available to single parents and young families.
"They’re not going to be provided by developers, developers have told us themselves that it’s as expensive to build a two-bed as it is as a three-bedroom, and they can make more money on the three-beds, so they’re not going to build the two, so how do we get round that?” he said.
In response, the council’s director of services for housing, Jonathan Cooney, said that the current system is the way it is to try and keep the process fair to all the applicants.
"We have to have regard for the fact that we can’t have all one-bed people competing equally with all two-bed people. If you look at our demand, 77pc of our demand is one and two-bed applicants,” he said.
“We are building one and two-bed properties, but given the historic under-delivery, it’s going to take time to catch up and meet the shortfall that’s there,” the meeting was told.