Civil Debt (Procedures) Bill 2015

I welcome the Bill which will make a long-sought change from the use of imprisonment for the failure to pay debts. The Law Reform Commission has long asked for a move away from the punitive to a more coercive approach to debt settlement which the Bill introduces through the attachment of earnings mechanism and deductions from social welfare payments. The Bill is being introduced in the context of water charges and the campaign to resist them and it is necessary. While opposing a charge or tax by voting or campaigning against it is a perfectly legitimate activity, a campaign which seeks to encourage people not to pay a tax or charge is not legitimate. Encouraging them to break the law, however much we might resent that law, is never acceptable.

When it is done by Members of Parliament, people elected to make laws and ensure they are implemented, it is utterly reprehensible. I do not say this lightly. In all my years in this House I have never made it a practice to criticise individuals or the positions they take; I have tried to criticise the policy rather than the person. In a representative democracy, no matter how diverse our views, we all agree to be bound by and submit to the decisions of the majority. That is what we mean by the rule of law. We agree, even when we lose an election, to be bound by the laws put in place by the elected majority. This is fundamental to democracy. I utterly condemn a campaign to tell people to break the law, particularly when it is driven by law makers. Some members of the Opposition, none of whom is present, do not see the irony of their remarks when they criticise us for a lack of democracy.

I fully support and laud these measures which have been designed to enforce validly made laws. The Bill is an appropriate, timely and proportionate response to the need to ensure the laws of the land are enforceable and enforced. The attachment of earnings and welfare payment deduction measures are part of a suite of measures to ensure payments. They add to measures which we voted in yesterday which make outstanding water charges a lien on properties. Those who oppose water charges seem to think the measures are so weak they will not damage their non-payment campaign or, given that the first cases will not come before the courts until 2017, that they can be ignored. While they are entitled to make this judgment, they are wrong. Nobody wants to appear before a court, either next year or next week, and incur the attendant expense. People do not want their employers to know that they do not pay their bills or to carry the notoriety of being a non-payer with them when they try to change jobs. They do not want their neighbours to know that they are not paying their bills.

While I worry that the enforcement tools may be tortuous, time consuming and expensive, they will and must work. If a country is to be governable, the laws of the land must be enforced and seen to be enforced. I paid the water charges introduced during the 1980s, while many others did not pay. They were abolished in the 1990s owing to political pressure. To this day, I speak to people who paid and who bitterly resent the failure on the part of the Dublin local authorities to collect outstanding charges. I do not blame them because I, too, resent it and it must never happen again. This time, everybody who can pay must pay. The many people who will pay and who pay for everything demand that we ensure all those who can pay will pay and we cannot contemplate anything else. We owe it to all compliant citizens to ensure they will not pay for the water of those who think, just because they do not like new charges, they can somehow opt out of them. Democracy does not work on a system of opting in and opting out. Those who lecture us about democracy would do well to remember that it is part of democracy.

It is out of the question that we turn a blind eye to collecting charges or take it easy on non-payers. We cannot allow a situation where half of the population will spend the rest of their lives conserving water and trying to minimise their bills, while the other half can daily water their lawns, run their taps, wash their cars and ignore leaks safe in the knowledge that their neighbours will pay for the water used. Compliant citizens will not tolerate this. We owe it to those who pay to ensure everybody who can will pay. There will be cases of people who genuinely cannot pay. The legislation caters for such cases by ensuring nobody will have to pay more than they are able. The vast majority will pay, but the rest must be subject to enforcement proceedings. If, for some reason, the measures do not work or prove too cumbersome, we must make it clear that further draconian measures of enforcement will be put in place.

I am concerned that certain people might fall through the system. The measures contained in the Bill deal specifically with employed and unemployed persons who refuse to pay. What will happen to self-employed persons if they do not pay? The only enforcement measure for this group is the default option of putting a lien on their houses. We need a more immediate method for collecting debts because otherwise non-payers may be carried for their entire lives. One option that could be considered in such cases is seizure of assets.

I am concerned about the provision to make tenants’ outstanding water bills the responsibility of the vendor when a house is being sold. If a landlord fulfils his or her responsibility by notifying Irish Water about a tenant, it is up to Irish Water to pursue the tenant for the charges. The vendor should be out of the equation at that stage. I acknowledge that deposit retention might compensate in some cases, but it will not always be sufficient because people who do not pay their bills tend not to be careful tenants. It may be the case that the deposits do not go far enough. We should be conscious of the responsibilities we are putting on the rental sector. We need a thriving rental sector and making life more difficult for those who rent premises is not in our interests in dealing with a housing shortage.

 I welcome the water conservation grant. I have seen several advertisements for conservation equipment and services for sale on a commercial basis, but the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government and Irish Water should develop a public information campaign on how citizens can reduce water consumption, minimise bills and, by extension, reduce their exposure to debt collection.

Once Irish Water is well established and leaks are repaired, I hope the unit cost of water can be reduced. The rates initially proposed were on the high side by international standards, but as new investment is made in the sector, it should be possible to reduce the unit cost. Those who oppose charges often make the claim that we have always paid for water. However, we did not pay enough for it. If the local authority delivery system was efficient and adequately funded, we would not face a water crisis every time we had a few dry days. Without Irish Water, we would not be able to cater for the many major industries which invest here on the basis of a clean, plentiful and reliable water supply. We would continue to have the wasteful and inefficient duplication of schemes on either side of county boundaries. We are dealing with years of under-investment in collection, treatment, storage and distribution, with the result that people in large swathes of the country are unable to drink the water from their taps. We must accept that the old system did not work. Notwithstanding all of the county engineers who did the best they could within the council system, the under-investment in water services in the various counties prevented the system from working.   We need to introduce charges to pay for the new investment and incentivise conservation, both domestically and by water providers, by ensuring they will have the funds to carry out repairs and invest in new water sources.

The Bill will not penalise those who genuinely cannot pay their debts. It deals with those who can pay but refuse to do so by offering a relatively cheap way of recovering debts through attachment of earnings orders from the District Court. It will also be useful for small businesses. We already have other legal routes for recovering moneys and this is just another option. It will be useful in the enforcement of water charges because it is relatively inexpensive and straightforward. That message must go out to all those gullible people who believed the promises of the anti-payment campaign that charges would be abolished or not pursued. They must pay. The law will catch up with them and the penalties will be much more painful than if they had paid up-front. Charges were abolished in the past, but this is not the 1980s. The population has expanded and will continue to grow and our demand for water will grow alongside it. People are now better informed and more conscious of the need for conservation. They are aware that every developing country charges for water. Deputy Mick Wallace referred to Italy, but in every country we visit people are charged for water. Nobody wants to pay more for services, but we accept that if we demand more, we must pay for it. What people will not tolerate, however, is the notion that some can get away without paying. Those who tell people they do not have to pay are doing them a grave disservice.