ELDERLY TOLD: LET OUT YOUR PROPERTY
Housing Minister to announce big changes to Fair Deal, freeing up more homes to be rented
NURSING home patients on the Fair Deal scheme will be asked to lease out their empty homes, in a new bid to solve the housing crisis. Housing Minister Eoghan
Murphy will today announce a number of key actions to make more houses and flats available.
They include proposals to change the terms of the HSE’s Fair Deal initiative – and already the Housing Department is getting ready to open up talks with the Department of Health on the issue.
Under Fair Deal, people who move into a nursing home have to contribute up to 80% of their disposable income to help cover the cost of their care. But if their home is put
out to let, the rent paid is counted as part of that income, so there is little incentive for them to do anything but let it stand idle.
There are around 25,000 people in nursing homes and a large number of those are covered by the Fair Deal scheme, so the minister is hopeful that the incentive scheme will free up badly needed houses and apartments.
The latest moves – coming before the announcement of a vacant homes strategy next month – include a new Empty Homes Unit within the department, which will link central government with local authorities to provide more homes.
Council chiefs have already been asked, earlier this month, to use Census 2016 data to identify ‘vacant hot-spots’ that can be brought back into use. Reports on City Action Plans, affecting the five main cities, are expected by the end of October, with County Action Plans to be completed by the end of the year. A website, www.vacanthomes.ie, will also be launched, which will give people the chance to anonymously alert local authorities about possible vacant properties. ‘The website will provide some useful information for property owners as to what steps are needed, and how, to bring their house back into use,’ according to the department.
Councils will also be expected to cut the time between when one tenant moves out and another moves in, by speeding up any of the maintenance work that needs to be done, and by identifying new tenants more quickly.
Another pillar of the plan will involve turning commercial property into homes, and a Bill to allow this happen without the need for planning permission will be brought to the Dáil in October.
Minister Murphy will also explore schemes to encourage suburban dwellers to move to the country. For this he plans to work alongside Independent TD Michael Harty, who based his election campaign on the regeneration of rural areas.
Mr Murphy had told the Dáil’s Housing Committee that the Vacant Homes Stratthe egy could not be published until the targeted review in Rebuilding Ireland was complete in September, but the department says the plans being announced today show he is ‘committed to ensuring that delayed publication would not delay actions to get housing stock back into use’.
The minister said: ‘Increasing supply isn’t just about building new homes, it’s about managing the stock that we already have that’s not being used. There is more to come under the strategy but this is right start. We need action taken at local level, with national coordination from my department. And the new website, being coordinated by Mayo County Council, is crucial because we need individual people in communities up and down the country to help us develop and implement a targeted approach as quickly as possible.
‘So we’re asking for people’s help to make this work.
‘We’re building new houses and we’re going to build more, but with the pent-up demand in the system from years of little or no construction activity, we have to manage empty homes back into use.
‘Almost 80,000 vacant homes were identified in our cities and towns back in April 2016 when the Census took place.
‘It’s critical that we get a proper handle on the vacancy levels, in terms of what’s changed and has come back into use in the last 16 months, where they are and who owns these vacant properties.
‘Armed with this information, we can then prioritise and target those areas where demand is greatest.’
‘There is more to come in the plan’