Mr. David Browne:

I thank the committee for the invitation to speak to it on the Vacant Housing Refurbishment Bill 2017. I am from RKD Architects and president of the RIAI, and my colleague, Joe Kennedy, is from Smith + Kennedy Architects. We are both practising architects working on the design and delivery of a broad range of building types - industrial, commercial and housing projects, both large and small, throughout Ireland and abroad.

The RIAI has a diverse group of practitioners working right across Ireland and the vast majority of our members work on exactly the scale of buildings envisaged in the Bill. They are available and willing to help right now with solutions. A total of 53% of architects are in practices of fewer than five people and a further 28% are in practices of fewer than 15 people, so the work proposed in the one-stop shop system is work in which they would be eager to participate.

The RIAI welcomes and supports in principle many of the concepts contained in the Vacant House Refurbishment Bill 2017, including measures that assist in providing residential accommodation to address the housing shortage, the restoration of vibrancy to towns and villages and providing accommodation for the smaller household sizes that are a growing part of society. We support the provision of co-ordinated local authority meetings where planners, fire officers, accessibility and applicable conservation officers are present. I believe that point has been raised in earlier debate on the Bill. We also welcome any measures to speed up the preconstruction approvals process for housing delivery so that the refurbishment of vacant buildings for housing may be implemented urgently.

In principle, many of the concepts in the Bill are consistent with previous RIAI recommendations and are to be welcomed, in particular moving away from self-certification by builders or developers and the verification of plans before work commences. Our comments and recommendations are made with positive intent with a view to improving and strengthening the Bill, increasing clarity in achieving its aims, and ensuring consistency with other complementary legislation. However, the RIAI has significant concerns in respect of many key aspects of the Bill in its current format which we believe render it unworkable and which we will set out. That said, we are keen to work further with the committee if requested to address the issues we raise. I will outline our observations and Mr. Kennedy will outline our recommendations.

The primary concern of the RIAI with this Bill is in its potential to undermine the safety of occupants of any new dwellings. SI 9 of 2014 was enacted to improve delivery of safe and well-built buildings, particularly in the apartment and housing sectors. Alignment of the Bill with SI 9 is critical to provide proper protection of the public.

If the Bill's proposals to compile lists of so-called authorised persons to oversee its implementation are introduced, we will end up with three separate systems for building control.

Those will be the systems under this Bill, SI 9 of 2014 and SI 365 of 2015. This will be inefficient, confusing and unsafe for the public. The RIAI believes that, in order to ensure the competency of the "authorised person" and the panel of "relevant professionals and authorised persons", they must comprise professional, trained people with the competence and experience to carry out assessment of applications and independent inspection of works.

The Bill proposes that the technical guidance documents, TGDs, be revised to indicate how the amended requirements detailed in the Schedule 1 of the Bill can be achieved in practice. The RIAI believes that this approach will have a number of negative results. There will be a two-tier system of building regulation and building control, which will be inefficient, confusing and unsafe for the public. It will be difficult in practice to achieve effective, robust change to the TGDs, given their current complexity. An effective relaxation of the building regulations, as proposed by the Bill, has serious potential to put at risk the occupants of new dwellings, particularly vulnerable individuals.

The Bill provides for a radical change to the current planning and building control systems. There is significant potential for unintended consequences. For example, a worst case scenario could result in the conversion of a relatively small non-domestic building into, for example, six bedsits with shared bathroom accommodation and substandard fire separation and means of escape if proper guidelines are not issued and rigorous inspection procedures are not implemented.

Therefore, it would be prudent to limit the lifetime of this Bill, in a revised format, to two years so that the outcomes may be understood. At the end of that period, it is recommended that a review of SI 9 and SI 365 be completed and the contents of this Bill and the Planning and Development (Amendment) (No. 2) Regulations 2018 be aligned.

No reference is made to zoning, vacant houses or vacant buildings in the Bill, nor any definition of what they comprise or the period for which they should be unoccupied to be considered vacant. The Bill does not provide for first or third party appeals. It also assumes that local authorities have the resources to deal with the additional workload that will result from it, which we do not consider to be realistic.