Damien English (Meath West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Senator Craughwell raised some issues about private housing. If people want to buy a house and knock it and replace it, that is their business and it is their money. We do not get involved in that. Those people must go through the planning process. That is people's private money and I am not going to go there. We have enough to do to manage public money and provide public housing.

The issue of high rents versus the option to get a mortgage was raised. The help-to-buy scheme was designed to help people to get the deposit and be able to draw down a mortgage to buy a house. We recognise the difficulty of raising the deposit. The bank rules were set to protect people. Many people were let down by previous Governments and were allowed borrow excessive amounts of money, which they could never afford to pay back for properties that were not worth the money. We are not allowing that to happen again. Through the intervention of the Government or the Central Bank of Ireland there are rules. Naturally they are reviewed every year to see if they should be tweaked. The Taoiseach has said that they should look at the level of the deposit, because it is difficult. The help-to-buy scheme was designed to help people buy a house. We watch this situation and we do try.

It was quite clear from past experience that when people could borrow more money they did borrow it and paid more for the house. That was not a sustainable model and did not give us a good result in the long run. We must be very careful in the way we intervene. We want to encourage people to consider home ownership as a choice. As a party and as a Government, we believe that choice should be there. I accept that it is not there for everybody at this time as properties are too dear. Senator Coffey listed all the improvements that will get us to that point eventually.

Members raised the tenant purchase scheme. We are committed to reviewing the tenant purchase scheme and we will come back in a few weeks with the changes that we are suggesting. There is a major issue for people who feel they are cut out of that scheme because they cannot raise an income of €15,000 per annum. The logic of setting a minimum income of €15,000 is that in order to own a house and manage it as well as managing your life, one would need an income of €15,000. There was no point in allowing somebody buy a house that he or she could not afford to manage afterwards. Some people who have access to a pension pot or some amount of money and want to buy a house feel excluded from that scheme. That issue is being considered in the review and we will have an update on that scheme in the weeks ahead.

Senator Craughwell mentioned the German co-operative model. We look at many different models. I do not know who Senator Craughwell has met, but I get a sense that he was over there with the co-operative bank model, which we deal with quite a lot. He is not present but I will talk to him about it. He named various councils, and he is not happy with the four-stage approval of Dublin City Council. There are different ways of bringing forward projects. There are many different companies involved in off-site construction, modular homes and different forms of rapid build projects. We try to encourage them once they have the proper certificates. If there is a way of building more efficiently and in a more cost effective and speedy manner, we are up for it. The local authorities are encouraged to use all different models. Dublin City Council has taken the lead in trying to allow for that in apartment building and it ran a competition to encourage rapid build construction. I think that was quite successful. It is doing a lot of work and is taking the lead to develop that framework. We want to encourage different forms of construction. We do not dictate to anybody what form of construction they should use, but we ask them to look at the different options. There are many factories developing off-site construction of modular homes which are worth looking at. That allows for rapid construction, but that is different from actually getting on site. There are still planning, procurement and other procedures that they need to go through in order to get on site. I wish it would only take five weeks to go through the process but it takes about a year for anybody to do it, but that is no excuse for sites that have been left sitting for years. We should be able to do this much quicker.

Senator Coffey raised the progress that was being made and noted the steady rate of improvement with the targets and aims being met. It does not mean we are happy with where we are, because as Members have said, we are not happy because we want to increase the supply of housing to bring housing into a more affordable space, to encourage more private housing. On social housing delivery, we had always said that we could not get from practically zero to 10,000 houses in one year but we have got there in three years. This year there will be more than 10,000 new social houses in the system. They have been delivered in many different ways. Some Members have issues with that and that is fine, but the Government has delivered 10,000 plus new social houses, with more than 6,000 direct build, some Part Vs, long-term leasing, acquisitions and some vacant properties as well. There are different schemes and there will be 10,000 more houses at the end of this year than there was at the start of the year. That is good progress. It is not enough, we want to build on it and go further. However, that would not have happened if we did not start the plan three years ago. I hear people from some parties say that they will build 50,000 houses next year. It may be Fianna Fáil saying this. I do not see the plan on how to deliver that. It does not happen that way. One has to start a year or two before the point to get to a level. That is what the Government is doing. That is why it was a five-year plan. It is working. It will work. I urge whoever else might be in charge in the future to approach the problem in the same way, with action plans that lay out the action that have to be completed by all the different players and implement it. This process has worked for jobs, it is working for housing and it will work for climate change. It is a good way to do business and I would encourage it. One will not solve a problem as big as the housing problem in six months or a year. Nobody believes that, people are not fools. People can see all the sites that are open and all the houses that are being built. They realise that there is progress. They will still give out that it is not enough, and that is the job of the Opposition and fair enough. One has to start, implement it and build the pipeline of supply, allocate the funding, go through the planning. One cannot just say that next year we will build 50,000 houses and it will happen. It does not work that way. Sinn Féin tried it. I have asked them many times where they get the magic pen and obviously Fianna Fáil went down the same road. I think people have moved beyond that, that they have realistic expectations.