Six years on, LDA to deliver first new-build homes
THE Land Development Agency will deliver its first new-build homes this year – six years after it was established.
John Coleman, the CEO of the LDA, the State’s developer, will tell the Oireachtas Housing Committee today that difficulty in accessing State land and recurrent ‘setbacks’ have hampered the pace of delivery.
When the LDA was launched by Taoiseach Leo Varadkar in 2018, it pledged to build 150,000 homes in 20 years.
Mr Coleman will tell the committee that once the LDA is granted access to land, ‘the delivery of housing typically takes at least five to six years’ if there are ‘no setbacks along the way’.
Common setbacks include securing planning permission and judicial reviews being initiated by ‘a small number of existing homeowners’ with the consequence of ‘delaying the delivery of homes for a large number of people’. Mr Coleman will say that the LDA project at the Dundrum Central Mental Hospital site is subject to a judicial review initiated by one individual, delaying 852 affordable homes in an area of ‘extremely high need’.
‘This is despite no objections arising from residents’ groups due to extensive community consultation we carried out,’ Mr Coleman will tell the committee.
‘Such delays significantly add to the cost of projects and we are hopeful that the pending enhancements to the planning laws will help reduce such delays in future.’
Mr Coleman will tell the committee that the LDA ‘is now on track to be one of, if not the largest housing producers in Ireland within the timeframe of its 2024-2028 business plan’.
In December, the Cabinet agreed to provide a further cash injection of €2.5billion into the LDA to finance its building pipeline up until the end of 2025.
The LDA currently has a direct delivery pipeline of more than 10,000 homes at various stages of design and completion, with ‘more being added as new lands become available or are acquired by us.
‘We have made major progress in bringing schemes through planning and around 6,000 of these homes now have planning permission,’ he will say.
Mr Coleman will tell the committee that, while construction inflation ‘has thankfully abated somewhat recently’, it is still ‘expensive to deliver housing in Ireland’.
Documentation provided to the committee last night shows that the average cost of building a home is €461,000, according to the Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland, with a detailed breakdown of each cost item.