The director of housing and planning with the Construction Industry Federation (CIF), Conor O’Connell has called on the government to address planning and infrastructure issues that are leading to delays in the building of houses.
Speaking on RTÉ radio’s Morning Ireland, Mr O’Connell said a federation survey of its members highlighted issues such as funding, lack of infrastructure and planning.
Funding mechanisms for schemes to aid apartment viability were delayed by more than four months, he said.
Mr O’Connell pointed out that there was a record level of 60,000 commencements last year, “but then when you go and try and get your connection agreement to your utility, whether that’s electricity or water, there are very significant delays because we simply haven’t been putting the pipes in the ground for a long time.”
Another example he gave was the “very bizarre situation” in Kildare and Wicklow where the Local Area Plan – which assigns how much zoned land can be activated in a given area, has expired. “Legally they can’t be extended.”
So it’s all of these blockages and some of these are just recent blockages and urgent action is required to address them now in the next number of weeks and months.
“One of the immediate mechanisms that the federation is calling for is for funding to be released for schemes that were put in place to address apartment viability and to deliver cost rental apartments in city centres.
“The funding for those mechanisms and those schemes ran out last October, November, and because of the election and the delay in forming a government, not one single one of those schemes has been approved over the last four months.
“Thankfully, we understand last Monday that the Cabinet allocated an extra €450 million to get some of those schemes going. Hopefully we will see commencements in the next number of weeks in relation to some of those apartment schemes, in particular in relation to the zoning and the infrastructure. We just have to have a look at our capital allocations for water and wastewater infrastructure because for instance in the Dublin area, the Uisce Eireann capacity register maps went from green to orange before Christmas.”
The allocation of capital towards housing infrastructure needed to be reviewed, he said, as the extra capital allocation for Uisce Eireann to facilitate infrastructure and services and serviceable lands that he understood would be going to go to pipes on the ground.
“Unfortunately, it didn’t. It went down into paying down debt. Why did that happen? I don’t know.”
The message to government, he said, was “we need to invest. We haven’t been investing in infrastructure for a long time to cater for the level of population growth.”
