Housing Agency suggests grants to refurbish vacant homes

The government should introduce tax cuts and a grants scheme to encourage people to refurbish vacant homes to help alleviate the housing crisis, says the Chairperson of the Housing Agency, Conor Skehan.

Vacancies are a normal part of the housing market, but in Ireland we have abnormally high levels, Skehan told RTÉ's Morning Ireland.

The Housing Agency, which is basing its vacant house figures on the 2011 census, is trying to get people to deal with a much wider range of issues than just proposing to build new houses.

“There are over 200,000 vacant houses in Ireland. What we’re trying to say to people is, look, here’s an enormous stock of houses that already exists - we’ve got to find a way to work in an integrated way to see what we can do to use those houses, to use them quickly while we’re waiting for new houses to be built.

“We need to get the figures right first, we’re going to work with Local Authorities to draw up a list of what houses there are available, where they are, what the issues are.

“We’re saying to government that there are a range of solutions. We are suggesting a system of carrots to incentivise people: grants to owners of vacant homes to refurbish them, perhaps a short break on taxation on income from rental returns for the first two to three years when they get a property back into use.”

He said the reasons for vacancies are very complex - “usually there is a wide range of them, speed of repairs, people trying to deal with conveyancing issues, connections to services, sometimes they’re in areas where people don’t want or need houses.

“In Britain they have an empty homes agency that goes around tracking and trying to fix this issue, it’s generally recognised internationally that you have to work hard to reduce it.”

The Housing Agency is basing its figure of 230,056 on the 2011 census.

“It may be that figure is slightly lower as that was at the height of the recession. In a city like Dublin eight per cent of stock could be vacant. This is an opportunity to get at two year’s supply of housing, just sitting there waiting to be used.

"The Local Authority system is only about seven or eight per cent of the whole housing stock. The Local Authority system has had their wake up call and are starting to make fantastic progress, places like Galway have got the waiting time down to the minimum.

"At the other extreme countries like Scotland and France have penalties for long term vacancies once your house is vacant for more than a year in an area of high population density, there is a dramatic increase in tax, we would prefer the carrot approach.

“Bringing properties back into use is the real trick. People in emergency accommodation are symptoms of a deeper cause, which is lack of available housing.

“We’re trying to get everyone to concentrate on the deep causes that produce these awful symptoms. Until you address the causes for a lack of supply we’re not going to make progress.

“Increasing housing supply is number four on our priority list, our first is to keep people in their homes, then use empty homes and focus on affordability. Deal with those first, then deal with supply.”