Just ONE civil servant tasked with revamp of 100K derelict or vacant homes

EXCLUSIVE: Paucity of staff in trumpeted housing unit

A GOVERNMENT body that has been tasked with transforming more than 100,000 vacant or derelict buildings across the country into housing is staffed by a single civil servant, the Irish Mail on Sunday has learned.

Housing Minister Darragh O’Brien has vowed that the Housing Vacancy Unit will ‘play a key part in delivering on the Government commitments under Housing for All, to tackle vacancy and ensure the more efficient use of our existing housing stock’.

The minister also promised funding would be provided to every council in the country to establish their own ‘vacant homes office’ to identify empty or derelict buildings that can be renovated to provide muchneeded housing.

However, even though the unit was established back in 2017, it currently boasts a total headcount of one.

Mr O’Brien confirmed the statistic in response to parliamentary queries from Sinn Féin TD Thomas Gould.

Commenting on the paucity of staff, the Cork North-Central TD told the MoS: ‘The absence of personnel is astonishing given that unit has existed since 2017. It is hard to avoid the impression the minister does not know what is happening in his own department.’

Criticising a recent scheme that allocated €450m to landlords, Mr Gould said: ‘There has been a tide of families being given notice to quit, families with both parents working and yet we have more than 7,770 properties vacant in Cork alone. Why isn’t the €450m spent on them?’

Mr O’Brien confirmed the Housing Vacancy Unit was staffed by three civil servants in 2018. This dropped to two by 2020 and for the past two years the unit has been staffed by a single civil servant at assistant principal officer level.

He said: ‘There are plans to hire a full-time principal officer (currently a principal officer is involved part-time in this area) and further staffing.’

Mr O’Brien also said the unit is ‘working on a suite of measures under the pathway to addressing vacancy and efficient use of existing stock. This will include the Croí Cónaithe [towns] Fund which will be delivered by local authorities for the provision of serviced sites for housing.’

The minister said the role of the Housing Vacancy Unit was ‘reviewed last year in the context of Housing for All’.

As part of this process, Mr O’Brien said the unit ‘is moving from the planning division to one of the housing divisions and the staffing is being increased’.

However, so far there has been no evidence of progress in transforming into housing the vacant and derelict sites that have become a blight on the streets of towns and cities.

In March, the MoS revealed that, based on the An Post geo-directory database, there were more than 100,000 vacant and derelict homes across the country.

According to John Daly, an economist with the Northern and Western Regional Assembly, ‘the figures continue to be static’. Mr Daly said this weekend: ‘The most recent figures show there are 90,158 vacant dwellings and 22,096 derelict buildings. This highlights the scale of vacancy and dereliction across the country.’

In response to queries from the MoS, a spokesman for Mr O’Brien said that every local authority in the country has been allocated ‘the requisite funding’ to pay for its own fulltime vacant homes officer.

However, Mr Daly said more than a single person per council will be needed to address the issue. He said: ‘Considering the scale of the problem it will take more than one person per local authority to resolve that. What is needed is a suite of officers, a unit – one person can’t fairly look after thousands of vacant houses.’

‘What is needed is a suite of officers’