Dáil Éireann Debate, Tuesday - 22 February 2022
11. Deputy Catherine Connolly asked the Minister for Finance further to Parliamentary Question No. 92 of 16 December 2021, the status of the promised review of the help to buy scheme; the terms of reference for the review; the person or body carrying out the review; the timeline for the review; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [9688/22]
View answerMy question pertains to the status of the promised review of the help to buy scheme, the terms of reference for the review, the person or body charged with carrying out the review, the timeline and if the Minister will make a statement on the matter.
I thank the Deputy, who raised this issue with me just in the week before Christmas. Where it stands at the moment is that I will soon sign off the terms of reference for this report. We will procure an independent consultant to the Department to carry out this work. I expect that will all be done in the next few weeks.
I thank the Minister. Will the terms of reference be published prior to the review going ahead? No. The Minister is going to go outside the Department for an external group to run it. When does he expect that to be completed? What exactly will it be looking at?
I realise our opinions on this differ. From anecdotal evidence on the ground and the figures, I do not believe the scheme has been successful at what it is supposed to be doing. In the Minister's previous answer, he referred to 60% of people needing help with the deposit. Therefore, 40% did not need help with the deposit. I welcomed his comment in his reply, which I had the privilege of seeing earlier, that the review will be extensive. He did not read out the whole reply so I am focusing on the positive aspect, namely that the review will be quite extensive. I would like to see a breakdown of those who benefit from the scheme, by locality, income and savings, to determine whether it is actually achieving what it is supposed to do.
I have no issue at all with making the terms of reference of the review publicly available. I will be happy to publish them. I do not want to do it at the expense of slowing down this process but there is no reason we cannot publish the terms of reference and make them available to the Deputy.
The organisation will be external to the Department of Finance, as is frequently the case with assessments like this. The review will consider whether we are now making the most effective use of State money in helping those who are looking to buy their first home. The Deputy and I have differing views on this. She will focus on the 40% who did not need the full support of the scheme to assemble their first deposit. I would retort that, with any tax measure, there will always be some who might not benefit as much as others. For a large majority of people, however, the scheme plays a role in helping them. We will consider the level of dead weight within the scheme and the degree to which it is helping those seeking to buy their first home, which must be newly built.
It is not "any tax measure"; it is a tax measure to assist people with the deposit when buying a house in a most serious housing crisis that is getting worse every day. I watched these developments as a councillor locally. I recall exactly when the construction started because we used to get quarterly reports telling us how many houses would be constructed and where. It stopped in 2009. The final column stated: "Construction suspended". From 2009 until a year or two ago, not one single social house was constructed in Galway. There are many reasons for a housing crisis but one of the major ones is the failure of government to be in the middle of the market, balance the market and build social housing - I prefer the phrase "public housing" - on public land. I cannot remember the figure pertaining to the increase under the scheme. A certain price was predicted and it jumped astronomically. The original estimate was €40 million per annum. By January 2021, the cost was €167 million. Then it went up to nearly €500 million, which is the last figure I saw, and higher than that.
The cost for 2021 was €191 million. It is the case that the total cost since the scheme was introduced in 2017 was €568 million. I agree with the Deputy regarding the essential role that public or social housing needs to play in ensuring that we have an overall housing policy capable of working more effectively. That is why more than 6,000 social or public homes will be built this year. Time and again, including earlier this evening, some Members of the Opposition, although I am not suggesting the Deputy, pick a particular aspect of our housing policy and suggest it is the only way in which the Government is seeking to respond to housing needs, including the need to build more homes. In conjunction with the scheme in question, we have a public housing programme that is gathering momentum week by week, with more homes being built across our country.
