Dáil Éireann Debate, Thursday - 13 July 2017
5. Deputy Jan O'Sullivan asked the Minister for Housing, Planning, Community and Local Government his plans with regard to developing and publishing a vacant homes strategy; the date on which he expects to publish the strategy; the elements he will progress in advance of publication; his views on the disappointing take up of the repair and leasing scheme; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [33629/17]
View answerLast week, the Minister told us that the vacant homes strategy was being deferred. We had been expecting it before the summer break although it was actually due at the end of March. He said it was being deferred because there were certain measures he wanted to introduce. I gather some of them may be budgetary. He also said there were some elements he could progress in advance of publication. My question is around what elements he might be able to advance ahead of publication. I have a specific query about the repair and leasing scheme, which does not appear to have taken off as well as expected.
Pillar 5 of the Government's Rebuilding Ireland Action Plan for Housing and Homelessness is specifically focused on utilising existing housing stock, with a key objective of ensuring that the existing vacant housing stock throughout the country and across all forms of tenure, in both the public and private sectors, is used to the optimum degree. In this regard, action 5.1 of Rebuilding Ireland commits to the development of a national vacant housing reuse strategy, informed by Census 2016 data.
To this end, the Housing Agency established a working group comprising senior representatives from my Department, local authorities and from the Housing Agency itself to inform the strategy. My Department has received the output from the work of this group and is at present engaging with key Departments and agencies to consider the analysis and agree on the recommended actions prior to publication. I would like to see as much ambition as possible in bringing as many viable vacant properties back into use at an early stage. I intend, as part of the review of Rebuilding Ireland, to explore what further actions can be taken and what new ideas we can bring to bear, in close liaison with ministerial colleagues.
If budgetary measures are needed to reinforce the ambition, this may delay the publication of the strategy. However, this will not delay the commencement of important work at local level in gathering more accurate and up-to-date information on where vacant properties are and who owns them, so that we can facilitate the reuse of many vacant properties, particularly in our cities and towns. I will be meeting with local authority chief executives next week and may release further details then.
Ahead of finalisation of the strategy, it is important to note that my Department has already introduced a number of significant measures under Pillar 5 of Rebuilding Ireland to incentivise the increased use of vacant housing stock to help meet the needs of those in receipt of social housing assistance. These initiatives include the repair and leasing scheme, the buy and renew scheme, and the Housing Agency acquisitions fund. My Department will continue to engage actively with local authorities, working together with the housing bodies, to maximise delivery from these schemes, particularly in respect of the repair and leasing scheme referred to by the Deputy, and to progress the wider range of actions to be finalised as part of the broader vacant house reuse strategy.
I welcome the fact that the Minister is meeting with the local authorities next week and hope that he will impress upon them the importance of proactively finding out why there are so many vacant properties around the country. I referred before and will refer again to the Peter McVerry Trust's specific proposal about having vacant homes officers in each local authority, whose role would be to try to bring those homes back into use. Even if the figure of 200,000 or so that is identified in the census is an overestimation, it would still be enough to address the housing and homelessness crisis if even a fraction of them were brought back into use.
I know the Minister might not tell me as it is a budgetary matter, but is he going to consider a vacant homes tax? Will that be discussed and considered in advance of the budget? What measures will he take to ensure that local authorities are more proactive in this area? There is so much potential and it is so much quicker to do up an empty house and bring it back into use than to build a new one. It seems to me that there is no great sense of urgency being shown in respect of the fact that these houses are there and could be brought back into use.
The Deputy is absolutely right to focus on vacant homes and the vacant homes strategy. As we discussed earlier, if we are to solve the problem we are currently facing, it is not just about bringing online new builds but also managing the existing stock that we have. That figure of 180,000 or 190,000 vacant homes in the country does not include holiday homes. People sometimes wonder. Some of the initial work that has been done in terms of trying to drill down into that figure would indicate that about 100,000 or 110,000 of those homes are not in locations where people actually need to live to work and everything else. We might be looking at a figure of about 90,000. When we break that down even further and take out short-term vacancies between letting periods, houses that might have been for sale and homes caught up in probate issues and things like that, the truer figure might be closer to 25,000. It is still a huge number of homes. It is what we need in a given year. We need to make sure that we can come with a very strong strategy to get those homes unlocked and lived in.
Again, I appreciate that the Minister is meeting the local authorities next week. Surely, a year after Rebuilding Ireland, they have some handle on exactly what is going on in each local authority area. It should not be too difficult, particularly in the cities where we have the biggest demand for housing. Has the Minister any sense of what might be available and why they are being left vacant for such a length of time?
The Deputy must bear in mind that we are talking about private property. If we are going to approach this we must do so in a way that is going to work. I have already begun consultations with the Attorney General and the Minister for Finance as to different measures that we can undertake.
The publication of the strategy may be delayed for certain reasons of which the Deputy is aware. That does not delay the commencement of work. When I meet with the local authority chiefs next week, we will talk about the work that is already under way. For example, we can look at particular counties like Louth, which has been very successful in pursuing compulsory purchase orders, CPOs, and using that tool to get houses unlocked. Of the houses that were unlocked in Louth, they only needed to use CPOs for a tiny fraction. It was the initial engagement with the owners of the property that allowed them to come to much quicker and cheaper solutions than would have resulted from going through the whole CPO process.
Work on this is already under way in the local authorities. The piece I have to do is to look at the different schemes that are in place to see how they have been working, whether they have been working, if we can streamline them in some way, and if we can bring more resources into those schemes. We need to make sure that the local authorities have the people to do that work on the ground in co-ordination with the unit of my own Department. I may be able to give more detail on that at the beginning of next week.
I suggest that the Minister also engages with the voluntary housing sector. Those groups will tell us that there are difficulties with the repair and leasing scheme and that some of the schemes that are in place are unduly cumbersome and not straightforward. Even when they identify homes that are available, they are having difficulty transferring them to their stock. I do not know if the Minister has the figure, but in terms of the repair and leasing in particular, does he know how much of the allocated funding for this year has been spent?
I do not have a figure for the allocated funding that has been spent so far on the repair and lease scheme. I have asked for that figure and am awaiting it. I have spoken to the housing bodies and to the Housing Finance Agency and the Housing Agency. The Deputy will be aware that there is legislation coming in the autumn in respect of the regulation of housing bodies. Once we have that in place, we can secure better and longer term sources of finance, for example from pension funds or potentially perhaps from the credit unions, as was alluded to earlier by Deputy Barry Cowen. When we do that, we are bringing greater resources to bear as well as greater expertise in terms of some of the things we might be able to do in conjunction with existing schemes, be they the repair and lease scheme or the buy and renew scheme, as well as other new measures that will be coming online.
While vacant homes will be part of the strategy, we also have to look at stranded assets, by which I mean, for example, space above a shop that might have previously been a home but has now become some sort of temporary or default storage space. Such a space could actually have people living in it and might be located where people want to live, in a village or town centre where all the transport, resources, shops and everything else are nearby.
