Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I know there are few people in this House, including me, who spend much time reading the manifestos of political parties but the commitment to increase housing supply to 35,000 to 40,000 new homes was contained in the Fine Gael manifesto for the last general election. I restated that ambition at the weekend and I stand over the fact that I did so. Back in 2016, we were only building 5,000 to 6,000 homes per year. We are now up to around 20,000 homes per year, notwithstanding the fact that construction was blighted by the pandemic. We used to build 80,000 homes per year and I believe that setting the ambition of getting to 40,000 per year is ambitious but realistic. It is double where we are now and half where we were during the housing boom some time ago. I am not saying we can do it next year - do not get me wrong on that. That is certainly not what I said, but I think we can scale up to that target. We think there will be about 20,000 public and private builds this year and perhaps we can go to 25,000, 30,000, 35,000 and 40,000 or perhaps we can go a bit faster to 27,000, 34,000 and 41,000. That is the kind of thing we are talking about in the Government as we put together the "Housing for All" policy, which is the Government's new housing policy, replacing Rebuilding Ireland.

I see Davy Group suggested in its report today that this is not enough. It said that we need to build 200,000 new homes in three years. Unfortunately, I do not believe it is possible to scale up to 60,000 or 70,000 homes per year in such a timeframe. I take the Deputy's point that if it was easy to do, it would have been done by now. It is not easy. We have issues around access to capital, both for the Government and private builders. We also have issues around a shortage of skilled labour and the availability of serviced land by Irish Water and by local authorities. We also have issues around the planning process, which takes a long time in this State and often ends up stuck in judicial reviews. We also have issues around the availability of materials. Steel is becoming more expensive and less available because of this central bank-fuelled boom around the world. Central banks have printed €9 trillion and that has driven up the cost of commodities, with a boom happening in China for example.

While they might not say it publicly, everyone in this House privately understands that there is nobody in this House who would not like to see more houses built as quickly as possible but there are lots of constraints that are not always under our control. We will do our best to deal with them as best we can, however. That involves increasing Government investment in public housing, of which social housing will be the major part. It also involves the Government investing in apprenticeships and the Deputy will know what the Minister, Deputy Harris, is doing in that regard. That is having some real success in getting more people into apprenticeships in line with the target of 10,000 apprenticeships per year. It will mean the Government trying to make sure that more sites are serviced through programmes such as the local infrastructure housing activation fund and the capital budget of Irish Water. Beyond that, there will be things outside of our control, such as the availability of materials, one of which the Deputy mentioned.

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