Sinn Féin will on Monday pledge to spend €39 billion on housing over the next five years to deliver 300,000 homes, if the party is elected to government.
Housing spokesman Eoin Ó Broin and party leader Mary Lou McDonald will unveil the new housing plan in Dublin, which will promise to end subsidies for home buyers, reduce rent subsidies, deliver affordable homes for between €250,000 -€300,000, strengthen tenants’ rights and freeze rents for all existing and new tenancies for three years.
The new strategy, called A Home of Your Own and long flagged by the party, will see Sinn Féin attempt to refocus the political discourse on to the housing issue as the new political term gets under way.
It hopes a renewed focus on housing will enable the party to build a recovery after disappointing local and European election results in May and a period of deep discomfort for Sinn Féin on immigration-related issues. The document describes housing as “Sinn Féin’s number one priority”.
Publication of the document comes after new homeless figures released on Friday showed 14,429 people, including in excess of 4,000 children in more than 2,000 families, were in emergency accommodation last month.
The latest data, published by the Department of Housing, also show the number of homeless adults surpassed 10,000 for the first time while the number of children decreased by three.
The full cost of the Sinn Féin plan over a five-year period, it says, would be €39 billion, comprised of €37 billion for a programme of new building and €2 billion for housing acquisitions.
It says a Sinn Féin government would provide €25.3 billion in direct exchequer funding in addition to €13.7 billion in loans from the Housing Finance Agency (HFA) and other sources.
“The annual average expenditure would be €7.8 billion of which an average of €5.1 billion would be from the exchequer and €2.7 billion would be borrowing from the HFA and others,” it says.
Other aspects of the strategy include establishing a public building company and, separately, trialling direct building by the State; providing 10,000 social and affordable housing units for older people; special plans for housing for people with disabilities; “culturally appropriate” housing for Travellers and a pilot programme for special housing units with studio space for artists and “cultural workers”. The party would also enshrine the right to a home in the Constitution, “providing those most excluded from the housing system with a legally enforceable right”.
The plan says 175,000 new homes would be delivered by the private sector over the next five years, with development accelerated by a series of reforms. The remaining 125,000 units would be State-provided social and affordable housing.
It promises a “radical transformation in planning, approval and tendering processes”, and says it would devolve greater responsibility to local authorities for actually delivering the housing projects.
Affordable homes would be provided at between €250,000-300,000, while the State would retain ownership of the land on which these houses stand. Sinn Féin pledges to work with private developers to accelerate construction by introducing a series of planning reforms and moves to free up development financing. However, it says it would end the help-to-buy scheme, the first-home scheme and examine ending other subsidies. Stamp duty would be abolished for first-time purchasers of new homes worth less than €450,000.
The plan also promises a new mandatory certification system for landlords “similar to BER certs”.
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