Populism does not deal with “experts” very well. We all looked on as Britain sidelined the people who actually knew what they were talking about during the Brexit debate. But in an era of soundbite politics, is Ireland any better? The Government ran away as quickly as it could from the hugely detailed work of the Commission of Tax and Welfare, with then taoiseach Leo Varadkar saying parts of it read like a Sinn Féin manifesto.
And the Department of Housing and Minister Darragh O’Brien immediately shunted the recommendations of the Commission on Housing over to the Housing Agency for “consideration” and ludicrously claimed, in classic Civil Service speak, that 65 of its 83 recommendations “are already advanced or at varying stages of implementation, with some more advanced than others”. Indeed. Perhaps the Civil Service system was a bit tetchy after the commission found a record of “ineffective decision-making and reactive policymaking”.
While many recommendations will be quietly strangled in committees, one was rejected immediately. This was the call to set up a Housing Delivery Oversight Executive — a small group which was to be given powers to drive the housing agenda across the entire public service. O’Brien said this would be “another layer of housing delivery”. You could just see why his department would hate the idea of control being taken away from it in this way and having to put up with this administrative overlord, in the context of a report which called for a “radical strategic reset” of policy.
Irish housing crisis: increased supply will not help affordability
But it needs to happen. Calls for new quangos should generally be resisted, as there are more than enough of them already. In this case, however, all the evidence points to the benefits of a body to co-ordinate what needs to be done across a range of Government departments and generally act as a thorn in everyone’s side. The Department of Housing does not have the firepower.
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This kind of thing has happened before. The National Roads Authority was established in 1993 to oversee the development of the primary roads network, a job which it delivered thanks to powers it was given in the area, crossing central and local government.
There are three key reasons why the new housing body is needed. The first is project management — or rather the lack of it — in dealing with the housing crisis. Delivering housing is a long-term game, involving a host of complex issues which go well beyond the remit of one department — for example, to develop new housing zones requires water, power and a predictable planning process. Right now all three of these are problematic. And that is before you even get into the core issues of planning, construction funding and so on.
The only way to deliver this kind of change is through a relentless project management programme. To build the new Ireland, we need an expert team of geeks with spreadsheets who know how to do this, headed by someone who is not afraid to upset the official applecart.
Ireland has the talents here. Big Irish firms have overseen large manufacturing projects here in sectors like pharma and exported this expertise overseas. It doesn’t always have to be a case of large overruns and delays like the National Children’s Hospital. But these skills are not commonly available across the Civil Service, with its generalist culture. And the complexity of planning and delivering tens of thousands of new homes of all kinds is immense.
The second reason we need an executive charged with this job is to be a pain in the neck. The political system pays lip service to the housing crisis but can quickly get ambivalent if measures to address this upset people — and so planning reform is taking an age and, to take a specific example, the Government decision to give the go-ahead for the controversial and complex Shannon water pipeline to go to planning was delayed for months until after the local elections. Part of the role of the executive would be to continually call out these kinds of things both within the system and publicly. The Government has moved far too slowly, for example, to address staffing shortages in the planning system, or to ensure local authorities have the required firepower. Again, power struggles and retaining control are part of the story here.
The third key reason is the need for a rigorous financial overview of the large resources going into housing. Figures this week showed that the State in one form or another bought a quarter of all the new homes built last year. This is just one measure of the large State financial commitment going into the sector which adds up to about €5 billion in the Department of Housing budget but €8 billion — and arguably more — if all the ancillary spending is added in. And still, we seem to be running to stand still. The commission found that Ireland has “ one of the highest levels of public expenditure for housing, yet one of the poorest outcomes.”
In the web of State schemes to pay for and underwrite supply — and demand — and the ramping up and leveraging of Approved Housing Bodies, the Land Development Agency and so on, there are big questions of value for money and financial risk, as well as attracting funding. Part of this is addressing the fundamentals of planning delays and timely infrastructure delivery to remove a lot of the financial risk which is part and parcel of developing housing in Ireland — this is much more important than dreaming up yet another scheme with a fancy name to try to incentivise developers. Part of it is examining the contingent liabilities which are inevitable but must be managed. The State has no choice but to go deep and take some risks to solve this key economic and social problem, but let’s be sure we are doing it in the best way possible.
A vital part of the commission’s work was its tone — the sense of the magnitude of the task when the numbers living at home who would happily move out, a number equivalent to 10 per cent of all existing households, are counted in and the need for a real push in the State response. This is what makes the official “everything is in hand” response so disappointing. The experts have again been politely thanked, their work shuffled off to a committee, and nothing changes.