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HOUSING’S TOP CIVIL servant has said as part of the government’s new Housing for All plan, the government is willing to assess and tweak current schemes if needed.
Speaking at a housing conference in Croke Park yesterday, Graham Doyle, the secretary general of the Department of Housing said it was “disappointing” to see momentum in the housing sector “fall off a little bit last year”.
The government’s “Housing for All 2.0 plan”, a phrase he said he hopes doesn’t take off, aims to bring momentum back into the sector.
“A lot of the deals for the apartments that delivered volume in 2023 and 2024 were done in 2018, 2019 and 2020 when money was a bit cheaper, when the circumstances were a little bit better and when we were a bit nicer to international capital as a country,” he said.
“So, we need to get that volume back in.”
Doyle said work is underway on the new housing plan which is expected to be published in a “short couple of months”.
He told the housing summit yesterday that amending current policies aimed at incentivising home building, such as the Croí Cónaithe scheme which aims to make apartments more viable, will form part of the plan.
“Some of them [the schemes] work better than others,” he added. Doyle said some of the schemes have had to be modified over the years.
“We have shown a willingness to tweak,” he said, stating that work on the new housing plan involves assessing what has worked and what has not.
The government will make “tweaks” to the schemes “that make them more accessible to developers looking to use them”, said the secretary general.
There is a “willingness to do that”, said Doyle.
His comments come just a few short weeks after the Governor of the Central Bank Gabriel Makhlouf advised the government to take stock of their current interventions in the housing market before pursuing ideas such as easing lending rules for property developers.
During the conference yesterday, a number of industry stakeholders in the property sector called for changes to the Rent Pressure Zones (RPZs) to be clarified by the summer, so that investors can plan ahead.
RPZs are in parts of the country where rents are highest and rising, and where households have the greatest difficulty finding affordable accommodation.
Rents in an RPZ cannot be increased by more than 2% per year.
They were to remain in place until 31 December 2024 but last May, the Government agreed to extend them until 31 December 2025.
Taoiseach Micheál Martin said last month that the government is assessing whether an alternative system “which protects renters but also enables people to have a clear, stable environment in which to invest” can be established.
It is understood the new plan will form part of the government’s new housing plan.
Senior sources have stated that it is likely that RPZs will not apply to new built apartment blocks and that there will be no cliff edge or sudden rent increases for tenants currently in tenancies.
The secretary general said the government’s planning bill, which has been passed, but will take months to enact, has to be implemented at a pace.
He said the planning act won’t fix everything, but it will significantly improve things. Doyle said the CSO housing figures, which revealed that the government would not meet its targets last year, was a “wake up call”. In his view, momentum is returning, he said.
During yesterday’s conference, the secretary general was also questioned about the stalling of funding for several Approved Housing Bodies who plan to build thousands of social and affordable homes through cost-rental schemes.
Doyle said that the department has to “keep negotiating or upping” money as part of the National Development Plan, adding: “We can only allocate the money we are given from the centre.”
Money has been secured for the schemes on the department’s books, he confirmed.
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