Matt Shanahan (Waterford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I concur with my two colleagues.

The Bill before us today may be progressive, but again, we are tinkering around the edges regarding the whole issue of construction in this country. As I have said in this House before - others have said it too - at some point we are probably going to have to call the issue of housebuilding in this country a crisis. It has to be treated like a crisis. Unfortunately, we have not done that. We have loaded bureaucracy onto the system over the last ten years. We are seeing it now right across planning and development with Irish Water, access to ESB networks, roads, planning approvals and the planning appeals board.

I was speaking to someone earlier today about planning and AHBs. The person told me that when applications for new schemes are dealt with, they ran to eight to ten pages some years ago but now run to approximately 80 pages in terms of the business plan. Imagine sitting down, trying to compile it, read it and then trying to comply with it. We heard recently that the last national planning framework used census population data from 2016, which means that the increase of nearly 1 million in our population in the meantime has been completely missed in our housing targets. During that time, we dezoned lands that had access to utilities and now we are trying to figure out a way of getting them zoned again.

The other thing which is very noticeable to me, as somebody who is around the SME space, is the lack of new builders coming into the marketplace despite all that is going on with housing and all the work that is there for tradesmen. Look around, watch the vans on the roads and see what new names come up as building contractors. I do not see them. There is no evidence. There is a fundamental reason for this. Many people are happy to work in the trade, but nobody wants to get into building in any significant way because it is so difficult to make money at it now with the costs that are involved in it. One of the significant costs to builders at the moment is access to finance. The pillar banks are not lending to the construction sector. Small builders are accessing finance at 10%, 12% or 14% APR, which is not sustainable in terms of delivering viable housing. Access to skilled workers has been raised many times. We have to do more to look at the work permit scheme and try to offer people who have proven skills access into the country and fast-tracked citizenship. Beyond that, we need guarantees to affordability. That is one of the problems builders will have. At least if builders take on a social scheme, they know there is a buyer at the end, namely, the Government. They do not know that is the case if they were to build privately, and that is a significant constraint.

There has been a lot of talk in this House recently about value for money. I want to raise the treatment of void properties in so many local authorities around the country. Some of them have been out of service for six to 12 months. The average time to turn them around can be a minimum of six months, and the average cost is between €36,000 and €40,000. Does it make sense to go into a perfectly good house, pull out all the cabinets and white goods and give contracts to people to come in and put all of the equipment back in, all at a cost to the State? Two years later, if that house becomes void again, the same process is repeated. Nobody in the private sector who has to earn their money would put up with that messing. They would not decide to go into a house and root out everything. Getting it for free is the problem. The Government needs to talk to the local authorities and ask them why. I have seen houses that are perfectly habitable, where everything in them had to taken out and dumped. It makes no sense to me whatsoever.

In terms of the maintenance of the housing stock, is the Minister of State aware that, last year, the Government gave €85 million to local authorities to manage the national housing stock? At an average of €36,000 per property, that would cover approximately 2,400 properties. In this year's budget, I think the Government has given something in the order of €90 million. At the same average of €36,000, this figure would cover approximately 2,500 properties. The actual number in the social housing stock of this country, if it can be counted, is somewhere between 130,000 and 150,000 units. We are building up a problem. The same is true in terms of the housing bodies. The housing bodies have to pay for the maintenance of their own houses. Yet, they suffer around the country from differential schemes. We have no harmonised differential rent policy in the country. That needs to be looked at. Two people in the same scheme living side by side are paying two completely different rents. That is certainly not fair.

The issue of downsizing is something I came across in my own region recently. A lady had a four-bedroom house. Her husband had died and her children had moved away. She wanted to build a house on her land and was told she was not allowed because she did not meet the housing need as she owned a house already. A family was waiting to move into her house. That is the kind of policy dysfunction we are standing over.

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