Social housing targets
More than half councils yet to start building enough homes to meet quota
THE Government looks set to miss its target for building local authority houses this year with some taking more than three years to complete, the Irish Mail on Sunday can reveal.
An analysis of the most recently available housing data shows huge delays in completing local authority houses as well as an unachievable year-end target with more than half of all councils failing to even make a start on building enough housing units to meet their quota.
Housing Minister Eoghan Murphy set building targets for all 31 local authorities earlier this year in an attempt to boost the social housing across the country, totalling 4,973 new units. But to date as few as 487 have been completed. Other schemes which involve the acquisition and building of homes through Approved Housing Bodies (AHBs) bring the total number of homes built to 1,051 so far this year. There are currently 4,595 local authority units under construction; however, 2,834 (62%) of these were only started in the last quarter of 2017, meaning it will be some time before they come on stream.
One housing unit in Finglas, north Dublin, has been under construction since Q3 2015 and is still not finished, while 13 homes in Athlone, Co. Roscommon, and eight in Stepaside, Co. Dublin, have had workers on site since the beginning of 2016 but have yet to be completed. Even if all of the local authority social housing under construction were completed this year, this would only exceed the target by 109.
Sixteen of the 31 local authorities have failed to start building enough houses to meet their end-of-year targets, while eight have yet to deliver a single house this year.
In Tipperary, for example, where the minister set a 50-unit target, only one has been started.
Similarly in Sligo, a target of 34 houses was set and so far none has been delivered. Fifteen have been started, 14 of which began in the first quarter of 2017, while work on the one remaining unit only began at the start of this year.
In Leitrim zero houses have been built this year, and while it has a modest target of just 23 houses, work has only started on seven.
In Dublin city Mr Murphy targeted an ambitious 1,045 new social housing homes, but so far just 16 have been delivered while a further 66
have been commenced. Even if all of these were finished this year – which is highly unlikely given that work on 30 units on North King Street in Dublin 7 only began this quarter – the council would still only complete 7% of their target.
Earlier this week, the council’s deputy chief executive Brendan Kenny said the minister’s housing targets ‘frightened the life out of us’ when he came before the Public Accounts Committee.
On Monday the council indicated it would be using emergency powers to speed up the delivery of rapid-build housing with Mr Kenny vowing to reduce the waiting time by up to six months.
The delays in bringing local authority homes on stream have led to serious concerns about the Government’s ability to deliver social housing as well as the processes involved in green-lighting housing.
Fianna Fáil housing spokesman Darragh O’Brien hit out at the Government for continuing with what he described as an ‘insane’ policy and said local authorities needed to be given more autonomy.
‘The Government aren’t going to meet their social housing target again this year,’ he said. ‘They’re going to be well behind and the biggest issue is that they keep continuing with the same process that has failed.
‘One of the biggest problems is the control that the department have over the local authorities, they have very little autonomy. There’s a local authority cap of €2m, so anything over that has to go to the Custom House for approval.
‘If you’re building a social housing scheme of more than eight houses in Dublin it has to go to the Custom House for this famous four-stage procurement process that takes at least a year, 59 weeks, for them to process. That in itself is insane.’
When contacted by the MoS, a spokesman for the minister insisted he believed the local authorities will still meet their targets this year.
‘Approval process takes 59 weeks. That’s insane’