Another day, another dispiriting development on the housing front as the Irish Times reported yesterday that the State is on track to deliver less than 20 percent of the apartments it aimed for under a vital scheme.
Responding to this, Minister for Housing James Browne said that “radical thinking” is needed to solve the “significant shortfall” in delivery.
This comes hot on the heels of the Central Bank’s forecast predicting that the Government “will fall short of its own housing targets for the next three years in a row”. As reported by my colleague Maria Maynes:
“The Bank’s experts predict that housing completions for the next three years will be significantly lower than the government’s own targets. The State’s target for 2025 is for 41,000 new homes, followed by 43,000 in 2026 and 48,000 in 2027.
“However, the Bank predicts that there will be 35,000 houses and apartments built this year, rising to 40,000 next year and 44,000 in 2027. The government’s pwn targets were detailed in a briefing document which was handed to newly appointed Minister for Housing, James Browne. The targets in the Minister’s briefing were based on decisions made by the last government alongside the commitment made in the Programme for Government to deliver 300,000 homes between 2025 and 2030.”
So the Minister is right to suggest that radical thinking is needed, given that we’re coming up short on housing delivery along pretty much every metric. However, contrary to the usual cry of “Government isn’t doing enough”, allow me to float the idea that Government is doing too much, and it’s proving disastrous for getting homes up: the dizzying variety of property-related grants and schemes the Government offers stretch a numerically-challenged construction workforce beyond the point that it’s able to offer anything more to Ireland’s homebuilding effort.
Think about it: the National Home Energy Upgrade Scheme, the individual Home Energy Upgrade Grants, the Free Energy Upgrades (Warmer Homes Scheme), the Vacant Property Refurbishment Grant, Housing Adaptation Grants, the Solar Electricity Grant and more. All of these put more money in people’s pockets, for the purpose of carrying out renovations themselves – or far more likely – hiring workers to come in and do the jobs for them.
I’m obviously not opposed to the Government offering financial help for worthwhile causes, but we’ve gone far beyond that when it comes to home renovations and retrofitting. Whereas once, an insulator or a plumber might have had, say, four or five offers of work or potential opportunities, it’s not crazy to imagine that they now have 14 or 15.
The Fiscal Council estimated late last year that Ireland could do with an additional 80,000 construction workers to address the national infrastructure deficit (homes included, of course). Identified as additional barriers to getting things done are, as is well known, our restrictive planning system, slow uptake of modern construction methods and low productivity in the sector.
Rarely discussed however is the fact that it’s currently a garden of delights for those inundated skilled workers, who are notoriously difficult to get a hold of once they’ve started a job for you. That’s not because they’re sitting around, twiddling their thumbs, watching the phone ring out in front of them – it’s because they have multiple plates spinning at once.
We frequently seem to forget that we live in a world not only of limited material resources, but of limited time and opportunity costs, too. A Government faced with a skilled construction worker shortage, shortfalls in housing delivery, infrastructural delays and its own climate commitments might well consider that it can’t accomplish all of these goals at the same time.
Why not take a moment to consider whether some of our goals are in conflict with one another, or hindering each other, and think about slashing some of our extensive grants and schemes. After all, the idea that these programmes are having something of an under-discussed and therefore invisible effect on housing delivery isn’t all that crazy, when their explosion in terms of uptake over the past couple of years is considered.
The Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland in its 2022 annual report noted an 80 percent increase on the previous year when it came to home energy upgrades completed (27,200). Fast forward to 2023, the SEAI tells us that 47,900 home energy upgrades were supported, a 76 percent increase from 2022. Jump to 2024 and we’re told that 38,000 home energy upgrades were completed in the first three quarters of the year, which represents an 11 percent increase compared to the same period in 2023.
From the same source, we see that BER upgrades, low-income household support and general Government funding for schemes and retrofit programmes are increasing considerably year-on-year too. Those developments aren’t just poofing into place. They require skilled workers to put them there.
So while this measure likely wouldn’t fix the housing shortfall, seeing as many factors contribute to it, I can’t understand how a bit of grant-and-scheme slashing wouldn’t push some more desperately-needed workers in that direction.