Jackie Cahill (Tipperary, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I wish the community in Leinster House, Members and staff, a very happy Christmas. I hope they enjoy their Christmas and have a healthy and prosperous new year.

I recognise is the increase in band 3 to which Deputy O'Donnell referred. We are in band 3 in Tipperary. The increase is most definitely welcome and the €5,000 will bring many more eligible applicants in for housing support and get them on the housing list. I would be a bit greedy and say we need to go higher than €30,000. I have been lobbying for this increase for a number of years and will continue to do so. Even though it is definitely welcome, €30,000 is still a very low threshold. There are families who, even with only one person working outside the house, are unfortunately falling outside the threshold but they cannot afford to build their own house. The threshold needs to be kept under constant review but the increase is most welcome.

I will make a few points specifically on issues with housing in County Tipperary. We are a rural county and what applies to some of the major urban centres just does not work well in Tipperary. We need to in reintroduce long-term leasing as an option for small-time landlords. There are no significant commercial land operators in most rural counties and the leasing issues that adversely affected the more urban counties were not an issue in Tipperary.

Small private landlords, who are often incidental landlords, provide a useful support service in accommodating those who are in a position to avail of social housing supports. This is especially the case where there is no significant demand that would facilitate a new-build scheme by a local authority in a rural village. A private landlord may well be able to address that need. Such a landlord also acts to ensure the connectedness and support provided by local communities and families are retained in that rural area. The use of leasing for small-time landlords is not expected to be the main challenge of housing delivery but an important ancillary delivery support that will address the needs of particular circumstances.

With regard to the commencement of a target leasing scheme to be rolled out by the Housing Agency, it relates to new builds only and is for projects of 20 units or more that can be located around the county. While this is a welcome initiative, it is unlikely to be delivered by developers in my constituency given its rural make-up and will not address the key objective of this proposal. Tipperary also needs to be able to assess units already constructed in small towns and villages.

We need a second vacant housing officer given the size and length of Tipperary and the volume of work required to address dereliction and vacancy. Tipperary is a large county and addressing dereliction and vacancy is heavily personnel dependent and is a slow and cumbersome process. Greater activity and results could be generated with a second vacant home officer.

A repair and lease scheme could provide for a tax-based incentive scheme for those property owners in towns of 20,000 and less that is targeted at over-the-shop living. The current repair-and-lease scheme, as recently amended, is beginning to attract some attention for the more commercially-minded operators in the county. Most of the upper floors of our towns are owned by individual property owners who are not developers or significant risk takers. They are not willing to access this scheme because it is effectively a loan and there is a strong reluctance to go down this route. To get the upper floors utilised, it is considered a tax-based incentive scheme for those property owners in towns of a population of 20,000 or less will actively generate more interest and update the scheme to release much-needed units for accommodation in our towns.

I wish to see the introduction of a targeted, time-limited and location-appropriate tax incentive and other innovative financial support mechanisms that will deliver housing on lands that have planning permission including, but not limited to, reduction of VAT on new builds; an increase in the Central Bank multiplier for purchases to give a better standard of homes being built and lower operational costs of running same; and the consideration of all section-23-type incentives that are targeted, time limited and location specific.

The key delivery challenge in Tipperary is the lack of any private sector new builds either for the affordable first-time buyer or the step-up buyer. The view is that a social housing delivery pipeline will address the key net social housing needs by 2026. I compliment Tipperary County Council on exceeding its targets for social housing. However, those citizens who are seeking to purchase their own home or wish to step up to the next home have no opportunity to do so due to a complete lack of activity by the private sector. It is the key dysfunctional element of the housing market in Tipperary. Only 3.8% of all transactions in the county in quarter 1 of 2021 related to new builds and these were generally one-off housing. The view is that it is now essential the Government steps in to assist in the correction of the private housing market, in a limited way and for a limited time, to activate the sector to deliver. It is not reasonable or humane to await the correction of the matter by itself, as citizens are struggling to find accommodation appropriate to their needs and the first home scheme is not set up to assist in addressing the need at this point in time.

With regard to a housing for all loan to better accommodate those who cannot access social housing supports, in a number of cases individuals were paying private rent consistently over a number of years on current accommodation and are refused permission for a housing loan on the basis they have no substantial savings in place or a lack of a strong track record on savings. This is despite the fact the private rent being paid would be significantly higher than the monthly loan repayment being sought. Changes should be made to allow for positive consideration of such cases because, if the private rent had been lower, such persons would have been well in position to have a stronger savings record. In addition, the purchase of a property through the housing for all loan scheme will ensure a better quality of life and a more secure accommodation option.

Every week I have people coming in to my office who are being refused mortgages by their lending institutions. They are going to the county council but few of them are getting through the hoops. We need to seriously look at this. There has to be a far more lenient attitude to giving people who are paying high rent the loan they need to purchase or build their home. The cap on the first home scheme in Tipperary needs to be raised from €250,000 to €290,000 to facilitate affordable housing development to occur. The current cap under the first home scheme in Tipperary will not facilitate any affordable units to be built or sold to first-time buyers. It appears the cap of €250,000 may be based on the sale price of units Tipperary under the property price register.

The number of new builds in Tipperary is negligible and the vast majority of sales are related to second-hand housing units. In quarter 1 of 2022, new build units made up only 3.8% of all transactions in the county. The purchase price point for a standard three-bed new build in Clonmel in 2021 was €270,925 and €194,729 for a second-hand house.

Delivery costs of three-bedroom units supplied by Tipperary County Council as part of our social housing stock currently, in 2022, average between €273,333 and €290,000 depending on the town location. The disparity between the cost of delivering a new-build, three-bedroom house and the purchase price of a second-hand, three-bedroom house is significant in Tipperary compared with the model affordability outputs based on the recent residential property price register data and the prices used as part of the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage's toolkit.

With rising costs of raw materials, labour and energy prices and expected increases in interest rates, it is anticipated that costs of new houses will increase further, so we urgently need the home first scheme threshold to be increased. No individual will be in a position to purchase affordable housing if the cap is retained at €250,000 for the simple reason that it is not possible to deliver a house under that constraint. The final difficulty with the cap constraint is that Tipperary will continue to be extremely unattractive to developers to build new housing units, notwithstanding that the KPMG report on sub-county housing mixed analysis indicates that a second-hand market is unlikely to be able to accommodate the projected demand for housing, even if the current residential pipeline of existing permissions was activated.

I hope that a home first scheme will provide the incentives needed for builders in Tipperary to commence the construction of those sites where active permission is in place, but it now looks very unlikely that the scheme will play any positive role in addressing the issue of housing for those outside the social housing support sector in County Tipperary if the cap constraint is retained at €250,000. I cannot stress how much we need that cap to be increased.

The last point I want to make is about holiday homes which received planning permission on the basis that they were to be solely used for that purpose. With the current emergency, the lack of housing for lease and refugees coming into the country, that condition on planning needs to be relaxed. If a person wants to lease that house for a long term or for the purpose of housing refugees, that restraint on planning permission should be removed.

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