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THIS WEEK, MINISTER for Housing Eoghan Murphy survived a second no confidence motion against him in the Dáil in 15 months.
The embattled minister has overseen a continuing rise in homeless figures and spiralling rents, despite suggestions that the housing crisis would ease as the delivery of new homes under Rebuilding Ireland continued.
But Murphy narrowly survived Tuesday’s motion by three votes, and defiantly dismissed the attempt to remove him as a “stunt”.
During a speech ahead of the vote, he defended his record on housing and Rebuilding Ireland, pointing to several figures which he claimed demonstrated that the government’s housing action plan was working.
Said Murphy:
We still have two years to go [on Rebuilding Ireland], but we have already delivered 64,000 new places to live. In the last 12 months, 26,000 new homes started under construction on new sites.
More than 30,000 homes have planning permission. These numbers are increasing. Only 4,500 homes were built in 2013, as I have said, but this year we will build more than 20,000 homes.
But how many homes are actually coming into the market through Rebuilding Ireland? And how many of these are new homes, as opposed to tenancies secured through the private rental market?
With so many different statistics cited when it comes to housing, let’s look at how many houses the government is really delivering, as well as how they’re doing it.
New builds versus deliveries
To unpack the figures mentioned by Murphy, it’s important to look at the language used by the minister when he talks about the number of new homes that make up official housing statistics.
In the quote above, he mentioned the ‘delivery’ of 64,000 new homes in three years, and said that 20,000 new homes will be built this year, which are not the same thing.
When the government says that it has ‘delivered’ a home, it means that one unit of housing has become available for an individual or family to live in.
But every ‘delivery’ does not just mean a new house or apartment has been built; deliveries can also come from the private rental market.
If a local authority builds a house, that counts as one ‘delivery’, as it does if a house is leased from a private developer.
But every time a tenant rents a house from a private landlord using the Housing Assistance Payment (HAP), that also counts as one ‘delivery’ – at least according to the figures cited by Rebuilding Ireland, the government’s five-year housing action plan.
And what’s more, the 64,000 figure cited by Murphy isn’t even the same as the number of homes which are counted deemed to have been delivered under Rebuilding Ireland.
Data differences
So where does the figure come from?
When asked to clarify, a Department of Housing spokesman said Murphy was referring to CSO statistics on ‘new dwelling completions’, which state that 64,595 new places to live were delivered between July 2016 and September 2019.
That statistic is made up of 52,647 ’brand new’ completions, another 3,657 completed homes in unfinished housing estates, and 8,291 more homes which were returned to use after they were deemed to have been vacant for at least two years.
But it’s been argued that this method could over-state the delivery of housing.
The primary data source used by the CSO for ‘new dwellings completions’ is new ESB connections, where the date that a house is energised determines the date it is completed.
However, this means a big number of vacant homes which have simply been re-energised being counted – one in eight ‘new completions’ in that 64,000 cited by Murphy, for example, is simply a home that has been re-energised.
Another method of counting new completions is commencement notice data, which is what Murphy was referring to when he said that “26,0000 new homes were started under construction on new sites” in the last 12 months.
But there’s another issue using this method: it could lead to the opposite problem of using ESB connections, as entire blocks of apartments and estates can be covered by one notice.
Similarly, many houses, estates and blocks of apartments aren’t completed in the same year they are commenced, so it’s hard to know how useful this method is for evaluating the delivery of housing.
Rebuilding Ireland deliveries
The CSO figure cited by Murphy is also problematic because it is divergent from the number of homes that have been delivered under Rebuilding Ireland.
According to the latest Rebuilding Ireland progress report, the government delivered 84,147 homes between the launch of the plan in 2016 and the second quarter of this year.
By the end of 2019, the government hopes to have delivered more than 91,000; and given that it was just 7,000 short of that by the end of the second quarter, it seems likely that it will reach that target.
However, 60,379 of those homes have come from the private rental market: 57,002 through HAP, and another 3,377 through the Rental Accommodation Scheme (RAS).
Critics argue that such an over-reliance on the private rental market is not sustainable. Last year, the government paid almost €700 million to private landlords through rent subsidy schemes like HAP and RAS.
An additional 23,000 HAP and RAS tenancies are expected to be delivered by the completion of Rebuilding Ireland in 2021, which will only increase the large amount of money the government is paying to landlords.
Built, Acquired and Leased
In contrast, just 28% of the homes delivered under Rebuilding Ireland have come in the form of social housing: 23,768 new or second-hand homes have officially been delivered under Rebuilding Ireland.
These homes, delivered through local authorities or approved housing bodies (AHBs) – non-profit organisations whose purpose is to provide and manage social housing – are categorised in one of three ways.
2,949 new homes have been delivered through the social housing leasing scheme, where local authorities pay near market rent to private landlords for social housing over a period of 25 years.
Another 7,783 homes have been acquired from banks’ investment or loan portfolios for use as social housing.
But the number of new homes the government has actually built through local authorities or AHBs stands at 13,036, including just over 1,200 new builds during the first half of 2019.
The government is targeting an additional 5,300 new builds by the end of 2019 and another 16,600 in the next two calendar years.
That would meet the target set out in its 2016 action plan, which aims for over 5,000 new units of social housing to be built per year by 2021.
And if it is met, around 30,000 homes – or 6,000 units a year – will have been built by the government over the lifetime of Rebuilding Ireland.
That’s significantly less than the final figure used by Murphy in his speech, which said that “this year we will build more than 20,000 homes”.
Asked to clarify this, a spokesman for the Department of Housing told TheJournal.ie that the minister was referring to the number of social and private homes that will be built, based on a Central Bank estimate that 23,000 new units will be completed this year.
But much like the opposition’s confidence in the minister, even that figure is uncertain.
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Hands up who else skipped to the end
@Stiofán Mac Stáin: sssshhhhhhhh ! You’ll be labelled a racist
@Stiofán Mac Stáin:Its not fair to apply the generic term immigrants.
True,the tech & other industries have high transient staffing which impacts on the rental market,but the refugee element are not the problem, since for the most part they are incarcerated in mobile homes, holiday chalets,redundant hotels.
Our native homeless are those who cannot pay free market rentals, & should be housed in local authority social housing, as was achieved on a grand scale in post WW2 Ireland.
Housing is a constitutional right for all citizens, and is a state responsibility, not a function of speculative market forces, which will never address social need.
It is delusionary to believe that speculators will invest in building homes for less than maximum profit up front, or that renters will lower rents.
@Stiofán Mac Stáin: you took the words straight out of my mouth and they can’t even house ourselves
@Briain O’Dochartaigh: Maybe because he possibly is one.
@Brian Patterson:
Why, may I ask, would you believe the dude to be a racist for asking a decent question on immigration. Is being curious about immigrant intake racist now? Are we really going there now?
@Stiofán Mac Stáin: April 2018 to April 2019-33700 immigrants moved to Ireland. That’s taking into account the ones that left. Unadjusted it was 88600. 54900 left. 52.8 percent of those who left were Irish while 30.4 percent of those who moved to Ireland were irish. You can check these statistics online at the central stastics office.
@All Aboard To China: muse
@Liam Mernagh: Mise
Delivered astronomical rent increases.
Ireland is now a turgid little country in which little or nothing works, big biz sell inadequate homes to families at massively inflated prices for people to sit in glacial traffic to get to work to pay companies and pay USC to cover debts they did not make. Their and your children will be next
@Albert Brennerman: The idea of punishing private landlords is so potent that it holds sway even as rents rise into the stratosphere. Paradoxically incentivising landlords is the one thing that could improve the rental situation for renters but the Government can’t try this option because it runs counter to their ideology and so they repeat the unsuccessful steps of the past.
@Albert Brennerman: 100% correct. Nobody even questions the inequality now. FF and FG will get voted in again.
And that’s what you call.massaging the figures
@Geoff Bateman: Mondays in Leo’s office: https://thumbs.gfycat.com/SeriousThatCrocodileskink-size_restricted.gif
@Damien Mc Padden: duking the stats
@thomas walsh: Yup. No clean figures in that house.
@Geoff Bateman: you cannot believe ANYTHING that comes out of a government minister’s mouth. They lie. Can’t understand why they think people will believe the rubbish they spout.
@Geoff Bateman: hes well trained, his father embezzled hundreds of thousands from gay byrne and others..
In other words, cooking the books, most of the ‘new homes’ are actually HAP, our money going to private landlords. Well done eoghan Murphy, clap on the back.
@Liam Byrne: You’re worse than that psychopath, God. Perfectly willing to find son’s guilty for the sins of their father’s. Except you go a step further and add on a generation.
So to summarize all of that. Murphy has absolutely no idea what is going on in the department he is supposed to be managing. He is spouting figures from every Tom, Dick and Harry from different organisations and has no idea what the data means.
ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM: landlords are taxed at the full whack => have to charge massive rents just to pay tax. Discuss.
@Ro-your-nan: absolutely true. And tenants get no rent relief any more.
The only landlords paying less tax are REITs, these need to banned. The small or few property landlord should not be taxed so high.
@Ro-your-nan: dont become a landlord, stick to one house and dont be a greedy shit
@Ro-your-nan: Don’t become a landlord.
@Niall Bourke: but if there are no landlords there are less houses to rent ergo higher rents.
@J: why? Do they demolish them all?
Many of the council new builds are simply built to replace houses that were knocked down due to being uninhabitable. Peoples homes were simply replaced by new builds. The actual numbers of new council builds is negligible. 2 big developments in Cork city by the council are simply replacing existing stock with new builds. Not brand new extra houses. The figures for new stock to council portfolios is negligible in real fact.
@Patrick O’Farrell: The bigger problem is that councils sold these social houses to residents. Social housing should never be sold. There needs to be a finite term where people are given houses for basically nothing.
Local authorities gazumping private buyers by buying entire private developments is just a cynical exercise. Especially when the very people funding it – young workers- aren’t given the opportunity & couldn’t even afford to own their own homes.
He has probably stopped more people building with their harsh rural planning laws than they have built
@Michael McGrath: Thats the local council and the residents,
In France 30% of all new developments, even if private, go to people who cannot afford to buy or rent for themselves. These houses/apartments are managed by organisations that let them to people at a reduced rate that is means tested.
Perhaps they could start simplifying and speeding up the planning permission process. The culture and history of height restrictions should also be addressed.
When the government is made up of landlords there will always be a housing crisis.
He hasn’t been removed because FFG have Monopoly, which they know they will keep.
A lot on here vote em and really don’t care for the homeless due to those votes…
Can something not be done with the ghost estates around the country to help house the homeless?
It should be the public voting on no confidence against tds and ministers not their own party who will never vote against them
We need to adopt the Vienna Method of social housing. Even the ministers party cant complain. As it makes money over a period of time and becomes self financing.
Ony problem would be in does not make the bankers builders and landlords super rich
What’s that guy still doing here? He couldn’t be more clueless and care-less if he worked hard at it!
20% rent decrease in rental hotspots and a 10 year rental freeze nationally is the only thing that would make any sense to me.
What’s the point in talking about housing crises FF will still leave us at the mercy of FG
Nothing like a little fiction to read on a sunday afternoon
Don’t believe a word of this or any government . Politicians are a waste of space . They would say mass if they could make money from it..
What about Nama, surely Nama has played a part in the delivery of housing?
have your say