Long-term Leasing of Social Housing: ‘Dispensation’ Sought

The Government’s Housing for All plan, which was published last month, commits to ending the practice of long-term leasing of social housing by local authorities and approved housing bodies, or AHBs.

Long-term leasing has proven to be a highly-efficient way of ramping up the delivery of social housing in recent years, however, it has also attracted criticism from opposition politicians and from some sectors of society. The value to the State of long-term leasing has been the subject of much debate and, as a result, the Programme for Government pledged to end the practice, in favour of the ownership of social homes. In theory this sounds right, the State ought to own more homes that can be used for social housing. But, in reality, the supply of ready homes and budget resources fall short of established demand by hundreds of thousands of homes.

Every day Dublin City Council must deal with the reality and not the ideal. People need homes today. DCC does not have the funding to buy as many homes as it requires immediately, nor does it have the ability to deliver them through direct building as quickly as required. This is the reality. Ought they tell families in need that our State has a moral objection to leasing over State ownership and as a result their family must wait 5, 10 or even 20 years? That is not a dilemma that any local authority ought to be facing in modern Ireland.

Consequently, according to The Irish Times, Dublin City Council is to seek an exemption or derogation from the Housing for All plan to end long-term leasing of social housing on the basis that advantages from deals with private developers are “hard to resist”. Faced with the daily dilemma mentioned above, the supply of turnkey housing would indeed be hard to resist. Prior to the launch of Housing for All, the council had already committed to leasing more than 400 social homes in 2021 and a further 2,500 up to 2023. Inability of the council to avail of these homes could derail plans to regenerate old flats around the city that are no longer fit for purpose. As an aside, up to 8,000 DCC-owned flats currently require substantial work to bring them up to European Union standards. The availability of long-term leasing schemes allow the council to rapidly acquire blocks of apartments that can be used to house residents of dilapidated flat complexes for long periods while the latter undergoes demolition and rebuild, or deep retrofit.

It will be interesting to see where the Housing Department lands on this. Surely the severity of the housing crisis is such that all reasonable solutions ought to be called upon in the immediate-term, while policy provides for the ideal over the longer-term?