Government Failure
Social Housing Strategy 2020 and Rebuilding Ireland continue with the same failed polices outlined above. Rebuilding Ireland promised 110,000 social houses over three years – at a cost of €3.8 billion. But 75,000 of these houses are to be delivered via the Housing Assistance Payment (HAP), which is basically a new version of Rent Allowance (with the only advantage being that the tenant is allowed work). The other 35,000 houses promised are not council houses either. Instead these will be delivered thorough a “variety of funding models” including Leasing, Part V, Approved Housing Bodies and direct builds. Only the last category is capable of creating new public housing units, but it looks like 67% will be delivered via leasing, 13 percent will be from the refurbishment of existing housing, and 18 percent a mixture of Part V and Approved Housing Bodies.
The government are also introducing local authority mortgages to allow individuals or couples to but their own houses. But this involves using public land for private developments. It is also vulnerable to creeping privatisation as local authority housing built on public land goes into the private sector without any increasing in housing for those on waiting lists.
None of this gets to the route of the problem. To solve what is an unprecedented crisis, People Before Profit would commence a major national public housing building programme which would construct 50,000 new public homes over the next 5 years. We would also reduce housing costs by introducing real rent controls linked to the Consumer Price Index, and backdated to 2011.