Conor Sheehan (Limerick City, Labour)

I do not want this plan to fail. The future of our country, particularly for people my age, depends on it. At last this morning, we have a new housing plan but I have never seen any government take so long to come up with so little. This time last year, the Government deliberately misled the electorate in terms of the housing targets. During the election, the Government never publicised its plans to hike rents, change the rental rules and shrink apartment sizes. This new plan tells us that the Government will deliver 300,000 homes by 2030 but it will need a minor miracle to deliver that. The Government has abandoned targets for the private sector and it is very clear that it has done this to shield itself from accountability because what one cannot count, one cannot measure.

The overall targets for this plan are wrong. They are too low and do not consider inbuilt demand due the housing deficit. The previous target for over 40,000 homes this year was a fiction so how is anyone expected to believe the Government will deliver 300,000 homes by 2030? The Central Bank projections are clear that only 36,000 homes will be delivered in 2026 and 40,000 in 2027. That leaves 200,000 homes to be built in the second half of this plan. That is a doubling of current delivery, with no sense that the private sector can or will do it. Construction activity is falling month on month. Developers are on the go-slow because they know they have the Government on the hook. The target of 12,000 social units is only a 20% increase on current targets when what is needed is closer to 15,000, as we proposed in our manifesto and as the Housing Commission, which the Government continues to ignore, stated.

In the section on promoting affordable ownership, there are no new measures, bar prize bonds, to make ownership a reality for people my age. In fact, the Government talks about new schemes but what it has done is mainly just a PR exercise of repackaging existing supports or renaming them. The Government's previous plan for affordable homes never delivered on its targets and its solution is to effectively put all of the supports together and rename them. There is nothing in this plan to show how the Government will build the tens of thousands of extra affordable homes we need or how house prices will come down, which they need to do.

We are told the LDA will have an expanded role but only €2.5 billion of additional funding is being provided and there is no clarity around what specific powers the agency will have. What is needed is a massive ramping up of State capacity to directly build social and affordable homes.

I have several questions. Why has the Government abandoned its annual targets? What is the Government's measure of success for this plan in year one? Will homelessness fall? What new specific measures are in this plan to make home ownership affordable again? What does the Government say to any young person, to people my age? Is it, as the Minister said, that they just have to hang in there and for what? Will it be for another 15 or 20 years?

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