Council tenants should be able to take the council to the RTB, says Housing Commission

If a council tenant needs something fixed in their home but the council doesn’t fix it, the tenant has no obvious place to turn.

They can complain to councillors, or to the Ombudsman or turn to the courts – but the latter option can be expensive and time-consuming.

The Housing Commission report published in May recommended that council tenants should also have access to a third-party complaints procedure.

“Regulate the landlord functions of local authority-owned dwellings and formalise the local authority/tenant relationship,” it says.

All other tenants can access the Residential Tenancies Board (RTB) and file a dispute if they have an issue with their landlord.

“We took the view that it’s an anomaly,” says Michelle Norris, professor of social policy at University College Dublin, who chaired the commission’s discussion on tenants’ rights.

The Residential Tenancies Act 2004 has been amended so many times it is confusing for both tenants and landlords, she says. “That legislation should be comprehensively reviewed and updated.”

As part of that review, the legislation should be streamlined to apply to council tenants and give them access to the Residential Tenancies Board, she says. “The purpose is to ensure equality and address the poor standards of some council housing.”

A spokesperson for the RTB says that its board has not considered the issue. But any such change would demand significant extra resources, they said.

“The RTB is currently focused on improving the level of service it offers to landlords and tenants in the private rented, approved housing body, student-specific accommodation and cost rental sectors,” she says.

Community activist Rita Fagan, a community development worker and housing activist, says that the government would be better off spending money for councils to do repairs and maintenance.

The RTB can’t meet its current objectives, she says. “It doesn’t have capacity, it has waiting lists.”

Rights and responsibilities?

“In terms of big, blue-sky thinking I can see why a government would consider doing it,” says Gavin Elliott, a lawyer with expertise in housing and tenants’ rights.

But it would be complicated, he says.

Law governing the rights and responsibilities of social tenants is totally different to that of private tenants, says Elliott. “It’s a whole different regime.”

There are pros and cons, says Elliott. It would give tenants access to a complaints procedure and potentially save the state time and money on court cases, he says.

The RTB has a good mediation system and offers a relatively quick and easy dispute resolution process, he says.

But council tenants have more stable secure tenancies than private tenants or housing charity tenants, says Elliott. He doubts if council tenants would be prepared to trade in those rights for better inspections and the right to complain.

In theory, council tenants have few rights, says Norris. But in practice, judges won’t easily grant an order to end a council tenancy so there is a lot of case law that gives them security of tenure, she says.

Council tenants have no right to independent inspections of their homes, she says, and no independent adjudicator for complaints, apart from the Ombudsman.

“On things like quality of dwellings, easy access to complaints procedure, council tenants in some ways have lesser rights,” she says.

The legislation needs to be streamlined, she says, to incorporate all tenants and move the issues away from the courts. “The system is very complex now,” says Norris. “All the regulation is completely pointless if it’s not enforced.”

Under the proposed reform, tenants would have a right to complain to the RTB and the council would be able to take a tenant to the RTB, for example, for non-payment of rent, she says.

Is it worth it?

In 2022, more than 150,000 households rented from councils, according to data from the Central Statistics Office.

It would be a major administrative task to bring all of those tenants under the RTB and would take significant resources, says Elliott.

Norris agrees it would take resources. But court cases currently use resources, she says.

“The absence of a quasi-judicial dispute resolution framework for local authority housing leads to lengthy and expensive court cases and judicial reviews on challenging local authorities’ interpretation of legislation and decisions on housing issues,” says the report of the Housing Commission.

Fagan, the community activist, doesn’t favour pumping more money into the RTB, she says. The government should just properly resource the councils to maintain their properties, she says.

“They should be enabled to purchase the right materials, to employ good electricians and carpenters and also to address attitudes towards the people who they service,” says Fagan.

The council should prioritise maintenance requests dealing with major issues first. “Prevention is better than cure,” she says.

Norris says that the reform would help motivate future governments to properly resource councils to maintain their housing.

In some other European countries, like France, Denmark and Austria, the government consistently spends money on public housing, she says. “They ensure long-term, stable financing,” she says.

The Housing Commission report is not a criticism of the current government, says Norris. “It is a long-term, big-picture strategy for how to transform the Irish housing system.”