Flawed rental sector reforms place too many tenants on a cliff edge, say Greens

Green Party Housing spokesperson, Cllr Oliver Moran, has today criticised the Government’s proposed new rent control measures as creating a series of new pitfalls for renters while leaving a cohort of renters on a cliff edge of uncertainty about the future of their tenancies.

Cllr. Moran says the measures proposed will leave many renters on a cliff edge with regard to their security of tenure, while others renters will be locked out of the protections offered by RPZs.

“The categorisation of landlords into “large” and “small” categories, with different criteria for each when it comes to no fault evictions is creating a fundamental inequity in the rental sector, where some tenants will effectively be more secure in their tenancies than others,” he adds.

“What the government has opened is a new category of precarious tenancy. Forty percent of tenancies fit into the ‘small landlord’ category. Now, those tenants will be carved out from the protections given to other tenants."

"We know from the experience of RPZs already that tenants are evicted so a family member can be moved in, only for the property to be on the market again at a higher rate. Now, the Minister not only wants to preserve that loophole but incentivise it further by carving out a sector of landlords’ arbitrarily.

"For the person living in a house or apartment, that's their home. It's no less their home if their landlord has 1, 3, or 10 properties. That basic principle of the right to a home, and the dignity and security that comes with it, is something that this government simply don't seem to be able to countenance.”