Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 1 March 2017

Select Committee on Housing, Planning, Community and Local Government

Estimates for Public Services 2017
Vote 34 - Housing, Planning, Community and Local Government (Revised)

9:30 am

Photo of Simon CoveneySimon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome Deputy Ellis. I am sure he will pitch in on the discussion as we go. I have given an opening speech addressing the areas of funding provision, housing, water, local government, community planning, Met Éireann and administration.

In some ways, I understand where Deputy Casey is coming from in terms of capital versus current spending on housing. This is a big priority for me. In spite of what people say about this Government, building new social houses is a huge priority for us. We have committed €5.3 billion to it. I think the Department is the only one that has a multi-annual capital expenditure agreement within Government to spend very significant resources in order to add about 47,000 social houses to the current stock. This has been committed to regardless of where the economy goes over the next five or six years. The majority will be new builds through local authorities and approved housing bodies. However, we cannot ramp up at the pace that some people would like us to. It is physically not possible in one year to go from building 74 local authority houses to building 7,000.

We are dramatically ramping up. Including approved housing bodies, AHBs, we went from a total build of 501 units in 2015 to 652 units last year and 2,434 units this year. We are also bringing voids back into use. As Deputy Casey has said, it is much faster to bring an existing house that is vacant or void or may need some work back into use than it is to go through the process of planning and building a new house. We need to do all of these things at the same time to try to deal with the housing pressures. That includes new builds, bringing voids back into use and acquisitions. From memory, we spent €203 million last year buying more than 1,000 houses. All of those properties are now in social housing use. Part of the plan was to get vacant houses back into the system and use them.

We are putting long term leasing arrangements in place. We have the rental accommodation scheme, RAS. The scheme that is providing the big numbers early on is the housing assistance payment, HAP. It does not simply switch people from rent supplement to housing assistance payment. Only about one third of people coming into HAP are coming from rent supplement. The majority are new tenancies that need State support to get a stable home. I would like to see an increased emphasis over time on newly provided social housing through local authorities and approved housing bodies and less of a reliance on the private rental market through HAP and rent supplement. In the short term, we have to put significant current expenditure into HAP while we are building up that capacity. We think 15,000 people will be added onto HAP this year.

At lunchtime today we will be rolling out HAP in Dublin. We have already rolled out homeless HAP, which has been quite successful. It provided housing solutions for more than 800 people last year even though the target was 550. We will be adding mainstream HAP to the four Dublin local authorities as of this afternoon. This will result in a lot of badly needed social housing provision through HAP across Dublin this year. We are going from providing just over 13,000 social housing solutions in 2013 to more than 18,500 last year, even though the target was just over 17,000 - we were 1,500 above that - to a target of more than 21,000 this year.

Anybody who questions the commitment to social housing provision across a range of blended measures needs to look at the financial allocation that we are adding through both capital and current expenditure. We are going from €800 million to €1.2 billion in one year, a 50% increase. That increase will be continued over the next three years. That is where the €5.3 billion comes from in terms of capital expenditure.

I agree that there is an opportunity in vacant housing. About 10% of residential properties in Ireland are vacant. In the UK and the Netherlands it is about 2.5%. If we were to reduce our vacant property percentage from just under 10% to 8% we would be bringing tens of thousands of houses back into use. Surely we have the capacity to do that.

We are allocating significant resources through the repair and leasing scheme and the buy and renewal scheme. We are trying to put a strong, stable, sensible rental market in place that will attract private property owners into the rental market when and where possible. That market will be managed by the Residential Tenancies Board.

I agree with the sentiment of everything Deputy Casey has said in terms of wanting to focus more on capital spend and build. However, in the short term I think we need a reliance on HAP to ensure we are helping the maximum number of families we can into social housing solutions that will significantly improve their quality of life.

There is a three step process in the new streamlined planning process for large developments. There is a pre-planning element which involves an informal discussion between a developer or builder and the local authority to put in place the ground rules and make sure an application is going to be ready for what will be a statutory pre-planning nine week process.

In spite of what some commentary has suggested, the big change is that the onus will now be on the developer to put together a much more professional planning application than we have seen in the past. I do not think poorly thought-out planning applications will even get through the statutory pre-planning process. I think they will be thrown out. Gone are the days when large applications would come in and then local authority engineers and architects would have to redesign them over a period of months through time extensions and so on to get them ready for consideration. That should not be the role of local authorities. Local authorities should be there to manage a robust and fair assessment process of professionally put-together large applications that are consistent with zoning and local area plans and so on. Then we go through the timelines of 25 weeks which give funders and developers certainty in terms of when they are going to get decisions. This certainty around timelines is very important.

We did get some negative feedback from councillors and, in particular, from Senators who were representing councillors. We made some changes to take account of those concerns and to make sure councillors were informed of the detail of big applications that were coming through. Even though councillors are not the ones that should be making planning decisions, they should know what is going on in their areas and they should be reassured that what is being proposed is consistent with the zoning decisions and the local area plans that they have approved.

I accept that the local property tax is replacing a different funding mechanism and it is true that it is not entirely new money. What is different about this is that the local authority has a say over whether to increase or decrease that fund and has more discretion over how it is spent. I am very open to this committee debating how local property tax is managed in terms of equalisation and the national equalisation fund. However, we must have some equalisation process between counties that do not have the population base and capacity to be able to raise sufficient local property tax to provide basic services, and other local authority areas that have very densely populated areas with very high property values and are making a very large income from local property tax. This year, I have decided to stick with the process that was in place last year. If people have ideas on that, I will happily take them on board and tease through these issues. I am not wedded to any one form. What we have at the moment is reasonably fair. Some local authorities argue that they should be allowed hold on to more, while others make the case that the equalisation fund does not give them enough. It is a reasonable balance.

Councillors frequently tell me that they would like to have more autonomy in terms of how they spend their budgets, rather than it being linked to national policy around housing or roads or maintenance or whatever.

I am happy to have that discussion but my understanding is there is quite a lot of autonomy in terms of how LPT money is spent. The idea that some of that money might go into housing makes a lot of sense for local authorities as well as for national policy.

On the social inclusion and community activation programme, SICAP - I think the public can get lost in some of the acronyms we sometimes use - how its funding is allocated really has changed the model. There is very little political input and certainly there is no ministerial input. I was essentially given a fait accompli which had been assessed by Pobal where projects and organisations had been prioritised on the basis of a scoring system and we effectively approved that. That is how it has worked, and that is probably a good thing.

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