Development levies to be waived to speed up house building

The Government will assume the costs of linking up public services like water and roads to new homes as part of a new housing package that will cost “hundreds of millions of euros” and boost building rates while lowering prices for buyers, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has said.

The decision to waive development levies, under which property developers contribute to the cost of providing public infrastructure and services, is part of a housing package due to be signed off by the Cabinet tomorrow.

The measures aimed to increase the supply of new housing, reducing the cost of building, and financing affordable apartments.

“It will cost hundreds of millions of euros,” Mr Varadkar said on the sidelines of a wind energy conference in Belgium.

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“At the moment, development levies fall on the developer and ultimately fall on the person buying the home,” he continued.

“We’re changing that now, so for the next couple of years the Government, the public, the taxpayer will cover the cost of that public infrastructure and that will bring down the cost of housing and accelerate the amount of new homes being built.”

The infrastructure includes linking new housing estates or apartment blocks to the water, road network or footpath system.

He denied that the move was a giveaway to property developers.

“I absolutely know it will be misrepresented that way and presented that way, I totally reject that presentation,” he said.

Mr Varadkar said it was “difficult to say for sure how many additional houses will be built” on top of already forecast rates of between 25,000 and 30,000 homes annually, but that the Government believed the measure would help it reach its targets of 30,000 completions this year.

The Housing for All programme “is definitely working”, he told reporters.

“We see more social housing being developed now than any time since the 1970s. Three or four hundred first time buyers are buying their first home every week now, we haven’t seen that since the Celtic Tiger period,” the Taoiseach said.

“But it’s not working fast enough, and that’s because we need to catch up on the really big deficit of housing that we have in Ireland.”