AH, YOUR LOCAL council – the library card in your pocket, the playground in your park, the lollipop at your school. Is there anything they can’t do?

Well, according to the government’s new housing plan, local authorities have one very important part to play: the scapegoat.

Taoiseach Micheál Martin recently lashed out at councils using their powers to decide which land should be for amenities and which land will be for housing.

The government’s new housing plan released last week is sadly more of the same: shifting blame onto local communities and local councils while pouring money into a broken system and rewarding land speculation.

Barriers to action

Minister for Housing James Browne wants to create a league table of councils to hold us to account. This is a good thing. But he should take his finger off the scales.

The biggest barrier holding back local authorities from delivering homes is central government. They need to realise that councils are much better-placed than central government to build communities, and in fact should have even greater involvement in delivering enabling infrastructure like schools, public transport and GP clinics.

However, currently we rank 43rd out of 46 in Europe for the autonomy that central government gives to local councils. Councils are a very easy target when they have almost no power to act.

Housing policy is complicated but there’s really two aspects that are important when we think about what role councils have in it: rules and funding.

Neither of these aspects are controlled by councils.

Funding to build housing, renovate social houses or buy homes comes from central government; similarly, the rules and laws that overarch our planning system are handed down from the minister.

Councils do their best to play by the rules and use the funding as effectively as possible. Yet even the act of participating in the planning process according to the rules laid down by central government is seen as an attempt to delay housing. Submissions on planning applications by Councillors and communities and rulings by planners are criticised as efforts to block housing.

You would expect the Minister then to be encouraging when councils actually get down to delivering housing.

If only.

We saw earlier this year that over half of councils had to put a pause on buying houses because they were not given enough Government funding, and the funding they did get was overly-restrictive. This ended up leaving hundreds of families facing eviction in limbo.

If this is not what councils are supposed to do, then what?

What makes it worse is that in recent years the Government hasn’t even been able to spend its entire housing budget. In a crisis, this is unforgivable.

Blame game

It is a surreal situation. Councils are blamed even if they follow the rules, and funding is stopped just as councils start delivering houses. Imagine playing a football game where the referee can call a foul whenever they want and ends the game when you start winning.

It seems like Councils are damned if they do, and damned if they don’t.

Listen out the next time you hear a minister play the blame game. They will never accuse councils or local communities of breaking any rules because they aren’t. Despite having no choice in the design of the system, councils are doing their best. And they are doing well. In fact, councils have given planning permission for 120,000 homes that have not yet started construction.

The blockage is not on councils’ end.

No, delays happen because the rules and funding that underpin the system lead to these very delays. A system that tolerates this level of dysfunction, whether that is by laws that aren’t fit for purpose or by under-funding those who deliver housing and infrastructure, is one that is terribly designed.

Unfortunately, its designers have not taken the opportunity in this new housing plan to deliver the improvements needed to fix this and unlock the number of houses we need.

This blame game is tiring, but at least it can bring us clarity on how to solve the housing crisis. There are a few things that the Government can do to work with, instead of against, councils.

Rules and funding

The big rule change that is needed is for the government to give councils emergency powers to Compulsory Purchase Order (CPO) vacant buildings and land. We generally try to negotiate first, but there are many landowners who are happy to sit on land and see its values rise – we can’t allow this to happen in a crisis.

On the funding side, there’s three big changes that would accelerate housing delivery.

First, we can’t have a repeat of what happened earlier this year where councils simply run out of funding, whether that’s for refurbishing homes or buying them.

Even where there is funding, it has not kept up with inflation. Take for example “re-lets”. When a council house becomes vacant, councils don’t just immediately allocate it to a new household. The council get in and perform necessary maintenance and energy efficiency upgrades. This makes sense as between tenancies is the best opportunity to do works that are more challenging in a lived-in house.

The average re-let cost is now €31,000 (up from €18,000 in 2019). Central government now contribute just €11,000 for each re-let, down from €12.5,000. Easy win: increase the funding and vacant council houses will have families in them quicker.

Secondly, councils should be given the development levies from construction in advance. These are the funds that developers pay for the council to build community facilities, but may not be fully paid until the development is under construction. This means councils’ efforts to provide infrastructure is always a step behind the housing.

The government could forward-fund this and recoup it back from developers. It would mean that playgrounds, community centres, footpaths and other infrastructure can be ready by the time people move in to their new community

Finally, funding is needed for the staff that are necessary for delivering housing, like planners and procurement experts, engineers and architects. Local councils are still operating under austerity-era constraints when it comes to hiring the workforce needed to directly build public housing, tackle vacancy, dereliction and deliver necessary community infrastructure.

We should all want to see this new housing plan succeed. Housing is too important to be used as political football. Fundamentally, what is needed is for central government to see councils as the vital and constructive players that we generally are in delivering housing. If we want to end this crisis, we need to all be playing on the same team.

Oisín O’Connor is a Councillor for Glencullen-Sandyford on Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council and Green Party Spokesperson on Planning and Local Government