Concerns over housing plan pandering to private interests

Central to Minister for Housing Simon Coveney’s much vaunted Housing Action Plan, to be published next week, is an acceleration in the “delivery of housing into both the private and social-rented sectors”.

Concern is already being raised, however, that the plan panders too much to the private sector, relying on it to resolve both the private and social housing crises without a sufficiently assertive role by the State.

Despite the efforts of Coveney's predecessor Alan Kelly, whose Social Housing Strategy 2020, published in November 2014, promised to ensure "every household will have access to secure, good quality housing", the numbers of families entering homelessness have continued to spiral while rents and house prices have climbed out of the reach of many.

The draft of the new Minister’s plan, dated some weeks ago, lacks crucial detail – particularly on how much funding he has secured to deliver 45,000 new social housing units over the coming five years.

That is expected to be in the final document and it will be interesting to see how much of the estimated €9 billion such a programme will cost is to come from exchequer funding, and how much from other sources.

However, the tone throughout the draft is revealing, replete as it is with hesitancy about the State intervening in the housing sector at all.

That being said, it brings an energy and a degree of innovative thinking absent from his predecessor’s document – particularly in identifying off-balance-sheet funding mechanisms, necessary to remain within the strict EU fiscal rules.

Housing Agency

The plan to provide €70 million in capital to the Housing Agency to buy homes in mortgage distress from banks and investors for social housings is welcome. It would be a positive step if this were to replace the cumbersome and unworkable mortgage-to-rent scheme.

It is unclear on whether the planned 50,000 new social housing units will be owned by local authorities and approved housing bodies, or leased from the private sector.

The Oireachtas Housing and Homelessness Committee was clear 50,000 new units needed to be added to the social housing stock, to be publicly owned.

It is clear the private sector is seen as a key to increasing social housing provision. Among the carrots will be upfront payments to developers for social housing delivered under Part V obligations, and opportunities to profit from the construction of ‘mixed tenure’ estates on publicly owned land. Some 25 per cent of these will be social housing.

Sinn Féin spokesman on housing, Eoin Ó Broin, who played a significant role on the Oireachtas Committee, described this as “deeply disappointing”.

“The Minister does not appear to have understood the central message of the Dáil Housing and Homelessness Committee, namely that the State needs to increase the social housing stock, owned by councils and Approved Housing Bodies, by at least 10,000 units annually,”he said.