Mr. Mel Reynolds:

I thank the Chairman and I appreciate the invitation to present to the committee. I will look briefly at the scale of demand and supply, particularly in the new-build sector. Then I will look at existing land and building capacity for existing structures and the opportunities that are there. I will then look at some of the barriers and the opportunities we have to remove these, which I will address at the end of the presentation.

On overall new housing output, we know that new-builds have increased from approximately 17,500 new homes in 2017 to 20,500 in 2020, which is a very welcome development. The interesting thing is that when this supply is broken down into where it is going, we can see that the number of houses that have been available to households has remained pretty much flat in four years. For example last year, of the 20,532 new homes built, nearly 5,000 were one-off homes which would never make it to the market, while the State and approved housing bodies purchased 4,715 from private developers and schemes. They also built some in some areas. Private non-households were also very active, with almost 3,500 new dwellings which were built or purchased.

We know then that the total figure for household purchases last year was around 7,425, which is slightly less than the number purchased in 2017. Remarkably, in Dublin, the figure for new houses aimed at households has actually gone down. We know that in the region of 28% fewer households purchased new homes last year in the four Dublin local authorities than in 2017, with a total of approximately 2,286 dwellings. That is despite the fact the new homes output has gone up only by 8% in four years. We have seen displacement by non-household entities in the new homes market.

In the social housing sector, we know Rebuilding Ireland was launched in 2017 and was meant to build 50,000 homes. Four years later we have seen 5,335 new homes built by local authorities and approved housing bodies and around 10,000 turnkey purchases. For every single home built by local authorities and approved housing bodies, two were purchased from the private sector.

The most absolute metric for additional homes to local authority stock is that there are no accurate figures. We know that in four years, fewer than 10,000 additional homes from all sources were brought into stock for all of the local authorities, and that is an average of 659 in County Dublin for the four local authorities. That contrasts quite markedly with the demand figure of around 120,000 households on the primary and secondary housing waiting lists. That is a fairly big gap between supply and demand.

On land availability, we know that the land aggregation scheme in 2015 noted there was about enough zoned land for about 414,000 dwellings which were serviced and 600,000 which were in tier 2. In 2017, the Rebuilding Ireland Land Map noted that there was enough public land for about 50,000 houses. In actual fact, the figure was a great deal higher.

By 2020, looking at Dublin City Council, the capacity on its land was that it had approximately 85 ha left, excluding the Oscar Traynor Road and the O'Devaney Gardens sites, which are the subject, I believe, of votes today. We also know that, remarkably, that the National Asset Management Agency, NAMA, disposed of just 7 ha in four years. It has approximately 97 ha of land that is controlled and owned by their debtors. Therefore, the combined land bank in the four Dublin local authorities in County Dublin is 182 ha, which is around 61% of all zoned vacant land, which is a huge number. At O'Devaney Gardens, densities of 200 dwellings per hectare suggests the State controls land with somewhere in the region of a capacity for 36,000 dwellings. This effectively means it controls the land market in Dublin city between the canals.

As to vacant buildings, we know that the most recent census had approximately 183,000 vacant homes. That had reduced by approximately 46,000 from the previous census, so with a reasonable stab at a figure, we would have approximately 137,000 such homes. That suggests around 40,000 existing dwellings are available over and above the normal rate of vacancy that could be brought back into stock relatively quickly.

We know that there have been a number of desktop studies, one of which has been done by UCC, the North Main Street study, and by the Dublin City Council, where it reckoned that, respectively, the capacity in city centre towns could be increased by almost 300% by targeting vacant infill sites and upper floors. We know that in Dublin city, the capacity there was approximately 4,000 dwellings in existing buildings. Critically, the census does not actually tackle or count the number of vacant spaces we have above the shops.

One of the key areas that I have looked at, which I will mention briefly, is our statutory permissions as a barrier to actual refurbishments. Currently, we have planning which is being tackled by a pilot scheme brought in in 2018. There are also disabled access, fire, and building control amendment regulations, BCAR, certificates, which are four separate processes, three of which are pre-commencement. These are extensive, not only in terms of costs, but it takes up to five to six months for even a very simple change-of-use application to get to the point where you can commence work on site. The difficulty is that because there are three different and separate strands, if you do not get one of those permissions, you cannot proceed.

It is not just the cost of it, which is something like ten times the cost of the same statutory permissions in the UK and Northern Ireland, it is the uncertainty of it. You can get planning permission but if you do not get your fire or disabled access certificates, you cannot proceed and vice versa.

One of the proposals we put in back in 2017, with colleagues Orla Hegarty and Lorcan Sirr, was the idea of a streamlined process where you could go into a local authority, there might be three or four separate queues, you bring your drawings in and get them stamped, go through all the various different hoops and you come out the door with a permit.

It is similar to a scheme that has been used in the US for a long time. A streamlined, over-the-counter process such as that would involve no diminution in existing building standards. It would allow us to set up an integrated approach whereby if there are conflicts between a protected structure and the technical requirements for disabled access, for example, they could be looked at behind the counter. A process like this could save in the region of five months out of that six-month application process, and save some 85% or 90% of the cost of a typical change of use application. In one case in my practice the fit-out cost was less than €30,000 for a 35 sq. m ground floor space, and the statutory permissions costs were more than €10,000. This is a very big problem. It is not just about the costs; it is also the uncertainty associated with it.