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

I thank Deputies for affording me the opportunity to present to them the key elements of the Government's Action Plan for Housing and Homelessness. The housing emergency, which is especially acute in our urban centres, is the most pressing social and economic issue facing the country. To have a home is a basic human need, and we are elected to this House to ensure all our citizens have a place to call home. The publication today of Rebuilding Ireland - an Action Plan for Housing and Homelessness is a step forward in providing good quality, well-designed housing for all our citizens within the context of a just society.

The concept of a just society is not new in an Irish context. Fifty years ago this September, the then Minister for Education, Donogh O'Malley, surprised the nation by announcing a free education scheme. Fifty years later, I think there is complete cross-party agreement on the gravity of the housing issues facing us. I believe that through the implementation of this housing action plan we can transform the State's approach towards social housing and the interaction of communities involving private and social housing. The current levels of homelessness are not acceptable in a decent society. A home is a basic need. At the launch earlier this afternoon, in the short video highlighting the new Sophia housing development in Sean McDermott Street, a young man captured the life-changing possibilities of providing a homeless person with an opportunity to have his or her own home where he or she can finally close the door on the experience of homelessness and have a place that provides warmth, security and a balanced, hopeful future.

A Programme for a Partnership Government rightly put the homelessness and housing challenge front and centre and committed to the delivery of an action plan within 100 days. That I am here today presenting an action plan, 74 days into our Administration, is testament to the priority that the Government, I as housing Minister and my Department places on developing and publishing this action plan as quickly and as comprehensively as possible. We were able to move swiftly because of a range of enabling and supporting work, including the contributions of the Oireachtas Committee on Housing and Homelessness, whose Chairman, Deputy John Curran, and members worked hard to bring together the many facets and challenges to be faced in addressing the many housing issues. I believe we have responded to all the key and implementable recommendations of that report. In the document we specifically have an appendix responding to each recommendation in turn in some detail.

Our current housing challenges have deep roots. For a decade, our broken public finances and even more broken banking and development sectors have been incapable of providing the housing we know we need. I believe that the publication of this document, Rebuilding Ireland - an Action Plan for Housing and Homelessness,is an important moment in public policy terms because it is the first time that Government has set out a holistic overview of the overall housing system. For too long, whether in this House, in council chambers or in public discourse generally, we have polarised the debate on housing provision, focusing alternately on social housing or home ownership needs but never bringing those two elements together in a detailed way. This action plan crucially brings together the two sides of the one issue, which essentially is about providing affordable homes, and State intervention when people cannot afford to do so. Too many of our cities, towns and villages show the effects of that kind of thinking, resulting in ordinary decent people being instantly categorised based on where they live or the name of the estate where they come from. This action plan points towards a very different path for the future. While it opens the door to a massive public house building and acquisition programme, it aims to deliver that programme not through large swathes of mono-tenure estates but through a mixed tenure approach to integrated and cohesive communities.

This action plan is ultimately focused on delivering more homes for the people who need them. It includes more than 80 separate actions structured under five main pillars that will address the needs of people who are homeless and at risk of homelessness; accelerate social housing delivery; build more homes for the wider housing market; improve the rental sector; and utilise the houses we have, many of which remain vacant.

I will outline particular actions that stand out for me as Minister and for the Members of the House. With regard to funding and viability, with the support of the wider Government and, in particular, my colleague, the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, Deputy Paschal Donohoe, a massive €5.35 billion of funding will be provided from now until 2021 to support the delivery of some 47,000 units of social housing. To ensure a planning-led approach to meeting our current housing challenges, a €200 million local infrastructure housing activation fund will provide enabling infrastructure to open up large sites for early development by housing providers, with potential to develop between 15,000 and 20,000 new homes directly linked to that investment, at least 10%, and potentially much more, of which will be social housing. A complementary National Treasury Management Agency, NTMA, and private sector large-scale infrastructure development finance fund will seek to provide additional funding for on-site works by developers. Underutilised and publicly owned lands will be opened up for mixed tenure developments to provide the social and market housing we need side-by side. Funding has been put in place for increased limits for rent supplement and housing assistance payment, HAP, from 1 July this year, costing approximately €55 million next year. A total of 2,000 affordable rental homes will be brought on stream, using the proceeds of the State's sale of its stake in Bord Gáis Energy, and measures will be developed to bring on stream an additional 7,000 student accommodation places by 2019, thereby providing purpose-built units for our growing third level sector, and in the process, freeing up rental properties in our cities, which is badly needed.

With regard to regulatory reform, legislation will be developed and introduced to the House in the autumn to speed up the planning process by enabling large housing applications to be made directly to An Bord Pleanála after careful preplanning consultation involving local authorities, to streamline Part VIII procedures for local authority and approved housing bodies, and to remove regulatory barriers to reusing vacant and underutilised properties, particularly in our city, town and village centres, many of which have suffered most in recent years.

A major new strategy for the whole of the rental sector will be brought forward before the end of this year, striking an effective balance between, first and foremost, the rights of tenants and creating a stable environment for badly needed investment. We have had debates on that sector already in the House, and I look forward to those consultations continuing. Putting in place a national planning framework early next year will ensure a long-term approach not only to planning for housing the 500,000 people who will live in our country over the next 20 years but also to identifying key sites and measures to ensure proper use of land and vacant properties. We will also be examining further legislative measures on mortgage arrears to do all we can to keep people in their homes, where at all possible.

On the issue of delivery, a new housing delivery office will report directly to the Secretary General of my Department and to me, as Minister, to co-ordinate key elements of the overall social and market housing delivery programme under this plan. A total of 1,600 currently vacant homes will be acquired by the Housing Agency for onward transfer to local authorities and approved housing bodies, AHBs, as an initial exercise for a new procurement centre in the agency.

A total of 20,000 new homes, 2,000 of them Part V houses, will be brought on stream by NAMA. There will be 1,500 rapid delivery homes built by this time next year - a trebling of the previous target - to banish the spectre of families living in totally unsuitable hotel accommodation. A new National Treasury Management Agency, NTMA, backed special purpose vehicle will look to access private funding sources to deliver additional social housing as part of mixed tenure developments. There will be 3,000 new homes delivered on State lands as pathfinder mixed housing developments. We hope that these will show an example for many others to follow. Social housing design, approval and delivery procedures will be overhauled to ensure swifter delivery. The number of tenancies provided by Housing First teams for rough sleepers in Dublin will be tripled from 100 to 300 tenancies and the housing-led approach will be extended to other urban areas. An additional 7,000 housing assistance payment tenancies will be delivered in 2017 and 2018. A new initiative will be put in place to provide access to independent expert advice and legal advice for people facing serious mortgage arrears, and more households will be facilitated with the option of a revamped mortgage to rent scheme.

Additional resources will be made available to An Bord Pleanála and local authorities to ensure they meet the statutory deadlines to which they have committed. This is an 18-week turnaround time for decisions for large-scale residential developments. The role of the Residential Tenancies Board will be expanded and strengthened. Resolution of unfinished housing estates will continue focusing on alignment with the social housing investment programme. Proposals for new urban, village and rural renewal programmes will be brought forward to harness the synergies between planning, housing and community development initiatives of the relevant Departments.

On the supporting measures, there will be enhanced supports for homeless families with children, such as the provision of free travel in order that families can better access the services and amenities they need. A range of measures will be advanced to meet the needs of homeless people with mental health and addiction issues. The HSE has committed to trebling the amount of money it will commit to supporting homeless people within 2016 and 2017. It is currently €2 million and it will rise to €6 million next year. As housing delivery activity ramps up, emerging skills needs will be met through measures to support the supply of skilled tradespeople. There will be better management of social housing stock through rapid re-letting of vacant units and through the introduction of choice-based letting which has enabled a 25% reduction in the numbers on the housing list in Cork.

Above all, I believe that through the implementation of the action plan, we can and will comprehensively address the homelessness issue, and not before time, and arrest the growing affordability gap for many households looking for a house. The implementation of the plan will drive the rental sector to provide a range of quality accommodation in bigger numbers and deliver housing in a way that supports and does not direct economic growth. We can also achieve wider objectives such as the need to support proper planning and sustainable development.

I look forward to hearing the views of Deputies on the analysis and actions proposed under Rebuilding Ireland - an Action Plan for Housing and Homelessness. I also look forward to receiving constructive input to moving forward its implementation. The State cannot do this alone. We need all stakeholders, especially housing providers, landowners, agencies and policy-makers across Government to work towards a common goal of providing good quality, affordable and well-located homes for our growing population. Business as usual is simply not an option. We each have our roles and must fulfil our respective responsibilities with the public sector empowered to act and the private sector enabled to support and deliver.

I believe this strategy to be a significant step forward. It is not the perfect article and we do not pretend it is. If there are mistakes in the strategy, we will correct them. However, I believe it is a very good start as a signal of intent by Government and a commitment of very significantly increased resources. It is a plan that has been tested and will deliver, if implemented, a very significant increase in the number of social house constructed and provided. This would kick-start the private sector into building the many more houses that are needed. We have the capacity, with this plan and its implementation, to get to building 25,000 housing units by mid-2019, but we need to go well beyond that figure to deal with the deficit that was created over the ten years of virtual inactivity in the construction sector. We need to go beyond 25,000 to somewhere between 30,000 and 35,000 housing units which are a mix of social, affordable and private. The structures, mechanisms and decision-making procedures that we are looking to streamline and improve by this strategy, can and will facilitate that. The construction sector's response today to the plan has so far been positive. We want to work in partnership with all the stakeholders, whether that is to address the vulnerabilities of people who are homeless, or people who are rough sleepers who rely on emergency accommodation night by night, or families who are living in totally inappropriate emergency accommodation at the moment. Ambitious targets have been set but it is intended to deliver on those.

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