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IRELAND IS IN the grip of a housing crisis. That isn’t our choice of phrase – it’s how the Minister for Housing describes the situation.
The country’s failure to build enough homes to meet demand has a lot of consequences, including a rise in prices, rents and homelessness.
Here we’re looking at social housing in particular. It’s connected to those other issues, but enough of a problem in its own right to be worth singling out insofar as possible.
There is no fixed, universal definition of social housing. It’s widely understood as involving public or non-profit ownership and/or management of housing. But as we’ll see, the government also relies heavily on subsidies to private landlords and considers that a form of social housing.
How many social houses do we need?
There are almost 92,000 people on the social housing waiting list, according to government figures. Put more technically, 91,600 households qualified for social housing support and weren’t getting it on 21 September 2016. A household can contain multiple people.
This doesn’t mean that 92,000 people are on the streets. Just under 6% were on the waiting list because they were “homeless or living in institutional / emergency accommodation”.
Fianna Fáil has claimed in the past that government waiting list figures are too low, relying on its own Freedom of Information requests to each council rather than the official assessment. It maintains that the real figure is 130,000. There has also been controversy about people being taken off the list for failing to confirm that they still need housing.
Sinn Féin and other opposition politicians, by contrast, are happy enough to go with the government’s data. The Housing Agency has published details of how the waiting list figures are gathered.
There were 1.7 million private households in the country in 2016. So around 5% of them are on the waiting list for social housing, assuming the government figures to be correct.
What does the government plan to do about it?
The Minister for Housing, Eoghan Murphy, has said that “the 90,000 people on the housing list will not all have social housing homes by 2021”.
That’s because the government plans to directly house only 47,000 of those people by then under the Rebuilding Ireland strategy.
On the other hand, it plans to help another 90,000 or so people with their rent. This happens under two very similar programmes where councils cover some or all of the money due to private landlords. These are the Rental Accommodation Scheme (RAS) and Housing Assistance Payment (HAP).
In both cases, the person benefitting still has a tenancy agreement with the landlord. Those qualifying for the main scheme, HAP, are responsible for finding their own accommodation but come off the social housing waiting list.
You can debate whether HAP is really “social housing”. It’s designed to replace long-term Rent Supplement – a quarter of people taking up HAP in the first half of 2017 have been transferred over from the existing benefit. People on Rent Supplement weren’t included in the figures for people getting “social housing”, whereas people on HAP are.
Then again, it’s a different scheme. Among other things, you can work full-time and still get HAP.
How are things going?
As we’ve just touched upon, the number of social homes built depends on what exactly you count.
The total number of homes “delivered” hit 19,000 in 2016, from a trough of 4,400 in 2014. That was above the headline target of just over 17,000. Here’s how these 19,000 break down, according to a recent Rebuilding Ireland progress report.
You can broadly divide these six ways of “delivering” homes into two: capital and
current.
Capital social housing (new homes owned by the State)
Homes provided under capital housing programmes are either built, bought or refurbished by the State. If you think that social housing only counts if it’s State-owned, you’ll care more about capital housing.
All told there were 4,900 capital homes provided in 2016, compared to 4,400 in 2015 – a rise of 13%. That’s still considerably below the levels seen before the financial crisis, when even excluding refurbishments, capital numbers were never lower than 6,000.
There don’t seem to be figures available for refurbishments until recently, which is why we can’t make an exact comparison.
The 2017 target is just under 5,000. Of that, only 2,400 are to be new builds. It’s hard to know whether this is likely to be met, but we do know that 856 homes were at “practical completion” stage in the first quarter of the year.
Current social housing (rent subsidies and homes sourced by the State)
If you don’t much care about how people are housed, so long as they are, you won’t mind throwing current social housing into the mix. This adds RAS tenancies, HAP tenancies, and houses leased from private landlords to be used for social housing. None of these schemes permanently add to the social housing stock.
There were around 14,100 current social homes added in 2016. That’s up considerably on the previous year, when there were 9,000. The aim for 2017 is to provide somewhere around 16,000-17,000 (we can’t be exact without confirmation from the Department). That’s principally made up of HAP tenancies, as shown in the chart below from the Rebuilding Ireland Action Plan.
That’s on track so far. Around 8,600 people had been signed up HAP in the first half of the year.
The Department for Housing has confirmed to FactCheck that the target for overall social housing provision in 2017 – both capital and current – is 21,000.
Our approach to these statistics
The government sometimes prefers to bundle leases in with capital rather than current housing. For instance, in a recent update on Rebuilding Ireland, it talked about the “social housing construction programme” made up of building, buying, refurbishing and leasing. Leases are also included in the 47,000 target for 2021 that we mentioned at the outset.
The opposition can, and will, argue that homes in this latter category shouldn’t be counted.
You can make up your own mind about which approach is better. In this article we’re categorising leases as current housing because the home ultimately remains in private ownership, as with RAS and HAP. That’s also the categorisation the government sometimes uses itself.
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Why the obsession with “social” housing? People who work need homes to buy also. We need housing not just free housing for the dependent class.
@Johnny Gunn: Where are the disabled and OAPs going to live along with the growing numbers of homeless workers?
HAP is shorterm unsecure joke. Are we going to go the way of the UK housing benefit disaster way which made millionaire landlords renting out uninhabitable dives and HAP the start of that slippery slope.
@Stan: landlords who receive the HAP payments have their properties monitored by the council. They do inspections and issue reports and then reinspect. They are very picky on their inspections like asking the landlord to remove weeds and clear gutters. They go through the property with a lot of precision. Perhaps you should do a little research before making comments that you know little about.
@Johnny Gunn: They’re not free you pay rent. Yes it’s lower than private sector (hence the social part) but you don’t own the house any more than any other renter does.
The “obsession” with it is because a lot of people can’t afford to rent with their income too low for the rising rents, and they can’t qualify for a mortgage (and we’ve already seen what happens when you give mortgages to people who can’t afford them), the only way to square that circle it to build social and affordable housing alongside the private stock.
Finally…most people who live in council houses work, and the insinuation that they don’t, tossing everyone in with the small group of welfare lifers, is frankly insulting. My parents lived in a council house and worked from the age of 14 until their 70s. People who work and have the average industrial wage of 800-1000 a week don’t need social housing because they can afford to rent in most cases, so why would we be discussing them?
@Stan: The governments answer is ‘to Hell or Connacht’!!
@Chris Kirk: Still no investment in the west. Higher road tax paid there too as a lot more older humble pre 08 cars and not a chip of new or improved tarmac even after awful crashes like yesterday.
@Brian Madden: The council’s washed their hands off maintaining any HAP house and leave responsibility solely to absentee landlords who get their weekly rent automatically from the council. There is way too little housing officers and no enforcement of standards. Many of the poorest and disabled citizens are automatically changed from Rent allowance to HAP and their home was never ever inspected for habitation for RA never mind HAP and these are cold damp leaky houses with mould everywhere and broken boilers etc. Landlords paid the landlords dole of RA and HAP regardless of standards on their inherited freebie house in alot of cases.
@Ryan Carroll: most people who live in council houses work is utter rubbish. Some or many who live in council houses work would be a more realistic statement.
@Neville Bartos: No, most work. That’s the fact, if you are immune to facts and figures I can’t help you
@Ryan Carroll: could you share these facts and figures with the community please.
@Stan: not True. Inspections are carried out and the property is reinspected. Councils have the power to prosecute landlords. Also all landlords should be registered with the rtb and they also have guidelines re the condition of properties etc. Broken boilers and mouldy walls as you out it are not permissable. Accidental landlords are not making millions of euro. They have mortgages to pay. Insurance. Tax. Property tax and boiler checks to pay for. As I said earlier. Check your facts before landlord bashing. Thx
@Johnny Gunn: Those stats are not online it’s not organized that way you have to look it up directly and parse it out, and it’s been 4 years since I did my housing module, but if it’s all changed since and new stats show most people in council houses dont’ work I’m open to correction, I seriously doubt it to be the case though.
CSO and DOH don’t seem to have it any better organized online now than they did then. Even going on anecdotal experience I could have called bs on that, everyone on my block worked bar one household (yeh, entire household…) even some of the knackeryest knacks that ever knacked worked on checkouts in tesco or something. It’s not right to demonize people just because they tumbled out of the wrong vagina in the wrong area code and didn’t have the same life chances as the people who were lucky enough to be born elsewhere. Individual effort alone is not always enough, sometimes the odds are stacked against you money wise from the get go and you need help, that’s why we have a social safety net to begin with.
Incidentally, many formally middle class people have now been shoved down to working class level because they defaulted on mortgages and are now technically homeless, and they worked all their lives, they need help too.
@Brian Madden: Try being a tenant for years on end and see how much the state housing officers inspect, enforce or even care about the tenant at all.
@Stan: I have been at both sides of the fence. Some tenants have no respect for the property, can thrash it and then refuse to pay rent and to get them to leave can take a year which causes default on the mortgage and lots of stress. All These regulations are forcing small landlords out of the market at a time when they should be encouraged to stay. Most landlords I know are waiting for their properties to get back into positive equity and will then sell. Yes here are many greedy landlords out there but also many sound landlords who have found themselves forced to rent out their property in order to get the mortgage paid. Taring everyone with the same brush is unfair.
@Stan:
Hit the nail on the head Stan.
Our FG Tory govt will continue to line the pockets of their property supporters, as they always have done. Irish govt’s have always cogged policy’s developed in the UK, whether FG or FF, our austerity has been in many ways a mirror image of what has gone on in the UK, as regards homelessness and food banks, and the destruction of the public health services in particular. All the while their propertied friends make their killings.
It will be interesting to see what whezzes they pull in the next budget next month to help out their supporters.
In the 50s and 60s when we didn’t have a pot to p@#s in we built large scale social housing which housed our citizens!
People raised large families with very little and these communities helped raise a generation of many very fine, talented, hard working and industrious people who built this country and paid their taxes.
These individuals who sneer about free houses are at best two generations from sheer poverty and dread to be reminded of it!
There never was free houses, you paid rent and the councils had a regular revenue stream!
Roll on #GE2017
@Jarlath Murphy:
And then the government realised it’s too costly in the long run.
Rent arrears, maintenance, low rent etc.
Where will the money come from to build all these houses?
Tell me where you would divert money from?
@Jarlath Murphy: And now we have coolock, Ballymun, Tallaght, Ballyfermot and other depraved s**tholes up and down the country filled to the brim with lazy welfare class citizens and their adhd.
@Jarlath Murphy: The reason we built them in the 50s and 60s and not now is political.
It’s the same reason FG is not doing anything to reform the health service the way past governments did (all be it unsuccessfully in many areas)
FF, Labour and (now) SF voters are affected by low bed capacity / high wait times and housing problems because their voter base spans from middle of the road incomes all the way to poverty. FGs base has always been (predominantly) wealthy farmers and the upper middle class, so when they knock on the doors in Mount Merrion and Foxrock they don’t hear people complaining about high wait times for elective surgery or homelessness they hear people totally unaware of their privilege complain they need tax cuts. To them a serious crime problem with be graffiti.
@Jarlath Murphy: In the 50′s and 60′s single mothers were sent to the nuns, now they are on council house waiting lists.
@Jimmy Ireland: Theres plenty of council areas that were not like Tallaght, those mistakes have been well learnt and in case you haven’t noticed they basically demolished Ballymun and rebuilt it from scratch.
@James Nellie: Get Apple and all cooperates to pay at least half of their 12.5% supposed rate instead of 0-2% tax haven they pay here.
@James Nellie: that’s because they didn’t charge enough rent or renew rent contracts when someone’s financial situation changed. I went out with a girl seven years ago. She paid 25 euro a week rent on a council house. She is now a social worker, married to another social worker. They take in 1500+ per week and yet the maximum rent that they pay is 50 euro. That’s where some of the problem lies .
@James Nellie:
Ehh …The same place we managed to find
60 billion to bail out the banks, might be a place to start, or the
13 billion Apple Tax, or the
2 billion we stuck into the Irish Water billing scam, or the
Eircode debacle, or the
E voting machines,
Do you want me to go on?
funny the way they manage to find a pot of money when it is a pet project of theirs isn’t?
Managing the maintenance of the stock is not as costly as paying landlords rents, another inconvenient truth!
@Jimmy Ireland: Really you think a lot of people who are still unemployed are lazy welfare class citizens despite them paying tax and prsi before the crash. I guess the education system I pay part of my taxes for failed in your case.
@Adrian Connolly: My parents got a long form sent out to them every year where they had to do out their income, even when they were pensioners and the state should “know” what they are earning (but should know that from revenue anyway), due to this stupid rule though, that departments can’t share information, it makes people lying on the form easier and that should be stopped, the system should be integrated with welfare and revenue so the council knows what money you are on without you needing to tell them at all.
Their rent fluctuated depending on what they earned over the years but they never missed a single payment their entire life, yet we knew someone who had gone a year without paying and hadn’t been evicted, that’s not fair to the people who are paying but soon as you go to throw them out you’d have the ULA/SOLIDARITY/PBP/SWP/SP whatever they call themselves now out screaming over it.
Social housing program would not actually cost that much in the grand scheme of things it’s all about priorities, same as health.
@Chris Kirk: FG Labour and FF pro lifers hate b@stard kids as soon as they exit the vagina.
@Jimmy Ireland: Jimmy do you actually believe the garbage that you spout?
The vast majority of the people who lived in those estates are fine upstanding citizens!
Some became business people, Drs, Solicitors, Guards, Teachers, Civil Servants, Trades, Retail, Builders, Operatives! There also unemployed and dysfunctional problem families like you find in every parish up and down this country!
@Jarlath Murphy: It’s easy to stereotype people when you don’t know them, then when you do know them you can lie to yourself by giving them the “oh you’re different / an exception” speech instead of actually recognizing you were mistaken in stereotyping people
@Ryan Carroll:
Ryan, I suspect some peoples issues are deeper than mere stereotyping!
@Jimmy Ireland: Ah Tallaght, here we go again, full of hard working decent people, including retired people like myself and my spouse, first generation of our family to educate our kids to third level. Take your prejudices elsewhere.
@Ryan Carroll: I also know people who have gone years without saying rent . You’re right, it isn’t fair on those that pay but it also isn’t fair on those waiting on a house and would quite happily pay rent .
@James Nellie: if you read elsewhere in the journal.the government has spent 3.6 million euro so far fighting the Apple ruling
@Jarlath Murphy: well said.
@James Nellie: seemingly Apple owe the Country monies in the region of 13 billion. Perhaps the government could have spent the money they have paid so far fighting Europes decision to build a house or two.
@Jarlath Murphy: Frankly, I did not see too many hardworking, industrious people the last time I went through those parts of Dublin..
@James Nellie:
Where there is a will there is a way. Public housing can be self financing.Nobody expects a free house.
Even the much maligined DeValera managed a public housing program in the 1930s when Ireland was a really poor country. Unfortunately FGs free market philosophy means that priority is given to the classes who support them, property owners, farmers, in short, Ireland’s ownership classes.
So they’ll build 2,400 units in 2018. Today builders say they need a minimum of €320,000 per apartment to break even. Total minimum cost is €768m. Dont think government will provide this. Also how did the builders arrive at the €320k per apartment. Dont think this is accurate and is grossly inflated.
HAP is endless dole for landlords. FIS is big companies dole. Welfare for the rich.
@Stan: get a job
@jfm: I work but my wages far below all landlords demands these days.
@jfm: Where are the disabled going to live smartarse. Not everyone can work and all low paid workers are working to pay all their pittance wage over to FGs landlord friends.
@Stan: Imagine what it must be like if you cannot get work Stan……
@Paul Coughlan: The price of land they are building on is the main driver. Builder buddies bought it for too much, when they thought the boom never ends..
@Paul Coughlan:
Hit the nail on the head. Develepers, who remember made a killing in the Tiger days and helped cause the financial crash along with the Banks, know they can push this laissez faire capatilist govt to the ropes in the hopes of major payoffs in terms of govt policy. Anyone who buys this nonsense that you can’t make a profit from building an apartment for over 300 grand is clearly a fool. That our government can produce an official report endorsing this nonsense shows how deluded and in thrall to the property, developer and Banking sector it is. Time to get in building firms from our EU partners to give these gangsters a run for their money if Irish builders won’t build houses at a reasonable cost.
@Paul Coughlan: The €320 K is a Dept’ of Housing figure.
There was a solution of sorts offered several years ago. 20% of all new estates had to be allocated for low cost or social housing. That seemed pretty effective as I know places where it was done. The councils had a better idea, You can just give us the money instead and we’ll invest it in housing. Except they didn’t. The councils gave planning permission out to the worst places because they took 20% back in payments. There are plenty of people on the social housing list that would be happy to pay an affordable mortgage on houses if they were supplied. Not everyone is a layabout who expects everything for nothing, there are people who will pay their way except the current economic situation doesn’t allow them to do so.
@Adrian Connolly: It wasn’t the councils’ idea: The financial contribution was built into the legislation. As with a lot of the half-assed ideas in this country, the root problem is that local authorities are expected to provide services while hamstrung by centra ldepartmental rules that don’t suit local services. We don’t have local government; we have local administration, ruled by often well-meaning but clueless central civil servants. The general principle is, whenever something goes wrong, to throw in yet another layer of bureaucracy, completely missing the fact that the administration overhead is, itself, often the root of the problem.
@George Salter: you’re correct, the problem with the social services as a whole is that they are disconnected to reality. There are people making decisions for certain parts of society that have no knowledge on what that part of society needs.
HAP is not a social house
The remarks of a tweeting senior politician on the massive increase in social housing construction reminds me of a descriptive moniker “TweetiePieLie”
@ adrien connolly the rent in not fixed as it’s based on a persentage of income….
When people receiving HAP are taken off the housing list then HAP is seen as an end result ie you get HAP so you are not on the housing list and your needs are met.
This is a misrepresentation as HAP requires you to find a place to rent and the place you are renting provides no security in a very volatile market. I believe that the administrative objective of reducing the housing waiting list has been put above the welfare of families and the wellbeing of children.
As long as local authorities poach on the private market for social housing solutions, there will be excessive competition with local authorities pushing up the prices through scarcity. The outcome is further homeless as people can no longer pay and more receiving HAP and on leasing schemes and the inward spiral continues. Lack of joined up thinking and is forcing more and more of tax money to be spent by local authorities without increasing supply. Very poor economics and it has the Simon Coveney kiss of death all over it as that man leaves each ministry in disaster. Look at Water, Housing and now Foreign Affairs. The worst part is that nobody gives a damn enough in government who might have a bit of ability to stop him. Right now we have phantom government and no logic at all on Housing and on Foreign Affairs. The focus is on careers and running an economy from Dept of Finance but certainly not running a country and looking after real people. Housing will not solve itself by government competing in private market, in fact this is adding to the problem. Thanking the ECB last week was the last straw, we should be negotiating massive capital inflow here for infrastructure. housing and Transport are a disaster. Health is on a permanent administrative apology setting and no real solutions in sight. Like it or not we need to stop government policy of all fur coat and no knickers while representing us in Europe.
Decrepit.
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