Minister, this is why our housing crisis won’t be fixed that easily...
The usually unflappable Housing Minister Eoghan Murphy had his feathers ruffled this week. On Monday, he proudly announced new progress on the housing crisis. But the response to his announcements was hardly what he hoped for.
A furore on social media disputed his figures and most newspaper headlines highlighted one astonishing fact: the minister still doesn’t know how many new homes were built last year.
At least now he’s admitting that he doesn’t know – up until recently, his department was still sticking to nowdiscredited ESB connection figures.
These seem to show over 19,000 homes were built last year, twice the level indicated by several sources of hard data, including the Central Statistics Office.
To add to the confusion, the Department of Housing couldn’t resist massaging the numbers further (see panel).
Housing Assistance Payments are long-term arrangements with landlords for social housing.
Focus Ireland, which should know, pointed out that a fifth of leases were counted as if they were new social homes, when they may have been transfers.
Similarly, the department was accused of ramping up new social housing numbers by counting people rehoused in temporarily vacant homes as if they were new homes. Why do they keep doing this? Why do they try to pull the wool over our eyes and end up being lambasted by a public who are way too well-informed for them to get away with it?
If only they had stuck to the facts, there might be some sympathy and approval for what they are trying to do. The latest figures show a big spike in the number of new home starts, if not completions.
And there was a huge increase in the number of social homes being built in the last quarter of 2017.
However, the spinning never seems to stop. Experts such as DIT housing lecturer Lorcan Sirr are suspicious about the sudden ramping of social home building.
He asked the department if these ‘new’ social houses have BER and completion certs – i.e. are they really completed or were they lumped into the figures at the last minute? We asked the department the same question. It didn’t mention certs but said: ‘Completions are recorded when the keys are handed over to the local authority and the ESB meter has been connected.’
In fairness, the housing crisis was a perfect storm, where banks, builders and the property market collapsed. It was always going to take many years to resolve. As the price people could afford to pay for homes halved, the cost of building new homes almost doubled.
Just before the crash, we also made building houses much more expensive with a raft of new regulations, on fire-safety, disabled access, professional oversight and council levies. So it wasn’t worthwhile putting up many new homes
– and still isn’t in most of the country. Local authorities also stopped building social homes – with arguably good reason at the time, if not now.
Across Europe, there has been a move away from large-scale social home complexes, where social problems abound.
Local authorities are terrible at managing large-scale developments.
It made sense to mix up social homes in private developments – or have them built and managed by housing associations, which are seen as the most succesful across the continent.
However, we had few such housing agencies, and it takes time to get new ones up and running.