Tánaiste Simon Harris has indicated he would be open to revisiting guidelines on apartment design in light of the housing crisis and the needs of prospective homebuyers.
In an interview on The Irish Times’ Inside Politics podcast, Mr Harris said it was probably the case that a “greater diversity” in terms of what can be built should be looked at.
The Fine Gael leader indicated he was cautious about injecting uncertainty into the market at a time when apartment building is struggling to attract investment, and warned that any steps taken would be subject to wider Government approval.
“Is there a rigidity in terms of designs? Possibly,” he said, adding that he did not want to pre-empt work that the Coalition may do in the time ahead.
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But he added: “We need to be brave and willing to look at a whole range of options.
“Standards matter, safety standards matter. Ensuring people can buy good quality homes and apartments matters,” he went on. “But also recognising that lots of different people have different needs in terms of designs, I think matters too. And is there space to look at that? I think there is.”
It is understood that apartment design guidelines were discussed at a recent Cabinet committee on housing.
Mr Harris also said Uisce Éireann could face new legally binding deadlines for connecting housing projects to the water system. The Tánaiste said he did not want to be “provocative” in dealings with the utility company or the ESB, “but we need to know that in return for providing Irish Water X billion more, that would result in Y more homes”.
“I think we need to look at things like statutory timelines for connections to water, to electricity, because there’s far too many delays in relation to that,” he said, adding that having such obligations for connections would “make a very significant difference in terms of building up the delivery of homes”.
Mr Harris also said he would consider bolstering the powers of the office of the new housing “tsar”, which the Opposition has said needs statutory powers to be effective.
He said he believes there is an emergency in housing, but he did not think it was necessary to declare such a state existed in legal effect and give Covid-style powers to the State to address it.
“If there’s a legal power that we believe we will require, of course we’ll visit that, or we’ll revisit that. That’s not my sense of where the challenge is,” he said.
The Tánaiste indicated that he wanted to broaden the remit of the Land Development Agency and to shift its focus away from cost rental homes. He said this was because he believed the agency’s existing focus on these types of homes means some prospective homebuyers are being underserved.
“Have we constrained [the agency] a little bit too much in terms of what they’re delivering?” he asked. “There’s a big focus on cost rental – there’s a place for cost rental but actually is that going to help many of the people who want to move out of the box room and buy a home? Perhaps not. We need to broaden, I think, their remit and that’s something I’d really like to see happen.”
