Local authorities to be told to add 50,000 housing units

The number of social housing units, owned by local authorities or housing bodies, should be increased by 50,000 over the next five years, the report from the Oireachtas Committee on Housing and Homelessness will recommend.

This would represent the biggest social housing project in the history of the State, if implemented by Minister for Housing Simon Coveney.

The report, to be published tomorrow, has been signed off by all members of the cross-party committee which has been meeting for the past nine weeks. It makes 23 key recommendations and more than 50 in total.

It says 10,000 new, publicly-owned units must be provided a year between now and 2020, at a cost of €1.8 billion a year.

If implemented this would represent an almost a doubling of the output demanded in the previous Government's Social Housing Strategy 2020, which set a target of 35,000 new social housing units over a six-year period and has been criticised for an over-reliance on the private sector to deliver social housing.

A source on the committee said this was the “most significant, most important recommendation in the report”.

The 10,000 new units per year would be provided through construction, acquisition and refurbishment.

Vacant buildings

Refurbishment would be of currently vacant buildings including those not previously used for housing. These could include disused schools, convents, barracks and Garda stations.

It is likely in the first year that the majority of the 10,000 new units would be provided through acquisition and refurbishment.

These would be paid for through a range of funding mechanisms, including increased exchequer funding, off-balance sheet borrowing and the mobilisation of funding from such sources as the Housing Finance Agency, the Irish League of Credit Unions and the European Fund for Strategic Investments.

On homelessness, the report calls for the restoration of the requirement, which expired in April, of Dublin local authorities that they allocate 50 per cent of available housing units to homeless households.

It also calls for this requirement to be extended to other local authorities facing acute homelessness problems.

Expedite delivery

It calls for the establishment of a housing procurement agency, which would have membership from the Housing Finance Agency, the National Treasury Management Agency, the Department of Housing and the Department of Finance, and would exist to help local authorities and housing bodies to expedite the delivery of social housing, particularly by helping them to access funding.

This is likely to be resisted by senior officials in the Department of Housing who will likely see this as an infringement of their function.

Traveller representatives should be among the new agency’s members, the report said. One of the agency’s functions will be to ensure local authorities implement their Traveller Accommodation Plans.

Traveller groups had called for a standalone agency to oversee delivery of Traveller-specific accommodation.

The report further calls for the national Traveller accommodation budget to be restored to 2008 level of €40 million, from its current level of €5.5 million.

On the question of a constitutional right to housing, the committee was split, with some wanting a recommendation for an immediate referendum on the issue, while others felt it should be considered in detail by the new Oireachtas Committee on Housing and Planning. The latter view prevailed.

The report also calls for legislation to introduce rent certainty, with rent increases tied to an index such as the Consumer Price Index, to be reviewed annually.