Special Cabinet meeting to finalise Government's masterplan for housing crisis

The €12bn-a-year plan will seek to deliver 33,000 new homes by 2025, as well as giving sweeping new powers to the Land Development Agency to meet its ambitious targets.

A special standalone Cabinet meeting is to be held to approve the Government’s much-delayed Housing for All plan this week.

The €12bn-a-year plan will seek to deliver 33,000 new homes by 2025, as well as giving sweeping new powers to the Land Development Agency to meet its ambitious targets.

A €500m fund, approved by the Department of Finance, is to be established to help developers to restore and revive cities and towns across the country.

Known as Croí Cónaithe, the living heart, it is designed to ensure developers build homes on a build-to-sell model for owner-occupiers.

'Single biggest investment'

Billed as “the single biggest investment in housing delivery since the 1960s”, the plan will see:

• New powers and money to be given to local authorities to build new homes;
• Kickstarting 80,000 unused planning permissions for homes, 40,000 of which are in the greater Dublin area;
• A major focus on reducing vacant or 'void' units in towns and cities, including above-the-shop units in city and town centres, which have traditionally lain idle;
• The transfer of some 1,400 social housing units from the National Asset Management Agency, Nama, to the Land Development Agency in a move that will secure State ownership of the homes.

According to sources, the Government’s objective is to achieve purchase prices in the range of €250,000 to €325,000 in Dublin.

However, such a range would still only be accessible to households with incomes around €85,000, whereas the national average income is €49,000.

According to sources, one of the key measures is to encourage older people currently living in large three-, four-, and five-bed family homes to downsize and free up that stock.

'Underutilisation of stock'

It also aims to tackle an “underutilisation of existing housing stock”, and moves will be made to force 80,000 unused planning permissions, granted in the past five years, to be used.

Half of those unused permissions are in Dublin, and this equates to four years’ supply for Dublin, sources have suggested.

Sinn Féin’s housing spokesman Eoin Ó Broin said the Government must double the fund for social and affordable housing. He said a target of 33,000 homes by 2025 is nowhere near ambitious enough and the plan must show specific annual year-on-year targets for how many directly built homes will be delivered.

“We will judge the plan when we see it, but it needs to be heavy on details, not on rhetoric,” he told the Irish Examiner.

Mr Ó Broin said promises to slash the 18-month approval process for housing schemes by the Department of Housing have come to nothing. These wait times should be no more than six months, he said.