The Irish Home Builders Association has expressed strong scepticism that 45,000 new houses will materialise in the short term as a result of the Government's latest initiative to provide more serviced land for the house-building sector.
Mr Michael Goggins, the association's director, told The Irish Times yesterday it was delighted an additional £30 million was allocated for water and sewerage services to increase the supply of building land. However, he said the extra funding, which is for a three-year period and tops up a special allocation of £15 million announced last autumn, would only provide new pipe-work, whereas sewage-treatment plants represented the "real bottleneck."
Mr Goggins cited the example of Swords, the county town of Fingal in north Dublin, where only about 400 new houses had been built over the past five years because of insufficient sewage treatment capacity; indeed, the existing plant was said to be "grossly overloaded".
The IHBA's view, already made clear to the Department of the Environment, was that only when the capacity of both sewerage and water treatment plants had been increased would there be a significant return from the extra investment in pipe-work.
Much as the association would welcome 45,000 new houses, Mr Goggins said it did not see this happening unless there was major investment in the treatment plants, running into "multiples" of the £45 million allocated for servicing land. He said the IHBA had been calling for additional resources to service land long before the Bacon report was compiled and this also formed part of its submission to the consultants. "We're obviously pleased that more funds have been allocated."
Mr Goggins also emphasised the need to increase housing densities to make optimum use of the initiative and said the Government's response to Bacon's recommendations was "encouraging"; however, there was also a need to educate the public in this area.
He said building to a higher density than the standard 10 houses per acre offered an opportunity to create more pleasant living environments, with shared spaces replacing private front gardens. It was not necessarily an argument for high-rise housing.
Mr Goggins also noted that the Government was meeting only 40 per cent of the cost of its serviced land initiative. The balance would come from housing developers themselves through the standard levies imposed by local authorities to cover new infrastructure.