Mr. Mel Reynolds:

I will come in briefly on the issue of cost. Deputy Ó Broin mentioned €245,000 for a new rapid build unit. That excludes the site cost. We know that the site cost on the Drimnagh site in particular is €120,000 per site so the overall cost to the State of a rapid build unit there will be more than €360,000. If one gets onto daft.ieone will see perfectly habitable houses for about €220,000. A broader question arises as to whether a cost benefit analysis has been done on any of these schemes. They certainly seem to be 25% to 30% more expensive than standard local authority homes at €180,000, a figure confirmed by the Minister, Deputy Coveney.

In terms of the cost for refurbishments, the Peter McVerry Trust has direct experience of that. Accounts that I have seen in a number of local authorities indicate that the cost for very heavy void refurbishments of State-owned stock is €30,000 or €40,000. In the private sector, as a rough rule of thumb, the hard cost of a building up to roof level, including the structure, windows, walls and foundations, is approximately half that. The remaining cost of, say, new kitchens, new bathrooms, redecoration, etc. would be about half that also The Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland's hard cost for a three-bedroom house is approximately €150,000. Approximately €70,000, excluding VAT, would be an extensive refurbishment cost for a house that was completely wrecked inside. That would be the cost for all the bits and pieces. That would be a good rule of thumb to start with, and that is for a 100 sq. m three bedroom property. It would be less for a two-bedroom property. It might be slightly more expensive if two properties were being knocked into one and if some structural work was being done.

There are many apartment developments that are earmarked for regeneration that have been vacant for years. It might be half the cost to do a good deal of work to them. We would be looking at a build cost of, say, €240,000 for a rapid build. One could do four, five or even up to nine void refurbishments that needed work for the same price as one rapid build, and those could be brought on very quickly. There would be no delays in terms of planning. They are already in place, and all the services are in place also. As the Peter McVerry Trust and others have pointed out, it is a no-brainer to do it and it should be done.

The Deputy mentioned the register of completions. As my colleague, Ms Hegarty, pointed out, we have a register under the building control management system, BCMS, although it is not published in a readable format. The disparity between the official completions data and what we are actually building is significant, at over 40%. For example, if we examine more accurate indicators we see that we completed fewer than 7,500 new homes last year as opposed to 14,500 previously. There are approximately 11 indicators of new build activity. The Department and the Government always seem to concentrate on the indicators that over-inflate that figure massively and, unfortunately, what are termed completions by the Department are meter connections to ESB Networks. That is not a criticism of ESB Networks. It is excellent to deal with, as is the Central Statistics Office, CSO. They are very helpful when questions are put to them. ESB Networks requires any unit that has been vacant for two years or longer to be reconnected to the grid. The old meter number is cancelled and the unit is allocated a new meter number. The significance of that is that upwards of 14,000 NAMA vacant units have been reconnected to the grid in the past five years; we know it is possibly more than that. At one point, 69,000 ghost estate units needed some form of finishing out in 3,000 estates also. These numbers are enormous. To give members an indication of it, the five-year total completions figure the Department claims were done between 2011 and 2015 is 50,951. Using more accurate indicators such as stamp duty transactions, new build and once-off commencements, the actual number of new builds is less than 30,000. Ironically, NAMA has been propping up the housing sector for the past five years by virtue of these vacant units gradually coming back into stock.

It also means that the capacity of the new build sector is much lower than we are led to believe. Last year, we completed 7,500 new homes within, say, an 18-month period. That is an increase of 22% on the year before that, which was 5,827. It is a 22% increase but the number is still very low. For the industry to grow safely and without the same quality problems we experienced at the end of the boom when we were building a massive amount of housing very poorly, we need to grow the new build sector slowly. New standards are coming in. There is a skills shortage. There are no apprenticeship programmes so the 100,000 vacant units Dr. Sirr mentioned are the buffer we need for the next five years to grow the sector. We have stood back and allowed the sector fall apart and wither. If we doubled output this year, we would be at 15,000 units, which is still much lower than where we need to be.

Longford was given as an example.

If it is going to cost one €10,000 or €12,000 just to obtain permissions and five months to sanction the change of use of an upper floor, and if one must then spend €20,000 or €30,000 to do up the unit, one must realise one can buy a ten-year-old two-bedroom unit in Longford for €42,000, as can be seen on www.daft.ie. The system is just not working at present. We need to reduce the costs and timescales involved in bringing vacant units back into circulation. We also need to be more honest about the figures and use them to inform policy. Quite simply, if we assume we are currently building 14,000 to 15,000 new homes per year, we are absolutely wrong. We are building approximately 40% to 45% fewer. With the skills shortages and the problems we have with new homes delivery, the effectiveness of policy to date has to be questioned. One must ask why we are concentrating on such a small part of the market? To put it in context, there were only about 1,000 first-time buyers of new homes last year. The total number of new homes built and sold last year, based on ten months of data, is estimated to be 3,434. That is all. Fingal County Council has 12,000 on its housing list. The numbers simply do not work; yet there are 98,000 vacant units, many of which are State owned, sitting there. They could be refurbished at a very low cost.

With regard to privately-owned stock, the simplification of the regulations could be achieved with three statutory instruments tomorrow. Primary legislation is not needed and nor is it necessary to produce another report. I started looking through Housing 2020 and lost the will to live after page 30. That is a 72-page report. It was like reading Rebuilding Ireland again. It uses all the same terminology. All the targets have been missed. For a practitioner and non-politician, or somebody not involved in this arena, it should be noted that Housing 2020 was launched in May 2014. It allocated €3.2 billion for social housing. The target is to have 25,000 social houses by 2020. In 2015, we built 64 local authority houses. In 2016, we built 117. Plans, reports and strategic targets are absolutely meaningless unless there is some sort of follow-through. This can be done very quickly. These three statutory instruments could free up an awful lot of privately-owned stock. If local authorities and the Department are playing pass the parcel regarding who did this, who said that, and who got funding, we could have 9,000 on the homeless list before the end of this year. We need to get moving on this really quickly.