IHBA does not believe home completions will increase this year
The Irish Home Builders’ Association (IHBA) has said it does not believe house completions will increase this year.
The organisation said this is due to a drop in the number of viable planning permissions combined with a lack of serviced land, infrastructure and funding for apartments.
Last year, housing output fell to 30,000 homes, far below Government promises for about 40,000 completions.
The IHBA said there is “palpable concern” residential construction will not rise this year.
The organisation added: “Expediting housing supply needs to be treated as an emergency and funded accordingly.”
It said to increase delivery, there needs to be more zoned land with services and a more effective planning system.
This week, it wrote to Minister for Housing James Browne, calling for planning applications, delayed by courts, local authorities and An Bord Pleanála, to be sped up.
The IHBA has also called for €500m to be provided to increase the pace of connections from zoned land to the water network.
“The connection application time frames must be within eight to ten weeks,” it added.
The body also called for the Government to extend the duration of all existing planning permissions.
It added that authorities should “immediately establish the strategic housing and infrastructure delivery office with significant input from active housebuilders to deal with current blockages to activation”.
The Director of Housing and Planning with the Construction Industry Federation, Conor O’Connell, said that a number of “blockages” is holding the industry up in relation to housing completions in Ireland.
Speaking on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland, Mr O’Connell said infrastructural issues needed to be addressed.
He said there was a record level of 60,000 commencements last year, but when someone tries to get a connection agreement to their utility – whether that is electricity or water – there are very significant delays because the country “has not been putting the pipes in the ground for a long time now”.
Mr O’Connell said that the plans for which local authorities zone land for housing also needed to be looked at, after the original plan expired.
It is understood the matter was on the agenda for the Cabinet subcommittee this week.
“The local area plan, which assigns how much zoned land can be activated in a given area, actually expired. Legally, they can’t be extended and following on from an An Bord Pleanála decision last year, those lands are now unzoned. But they can’t be activated for housing plannings at the moment,” he said.
Mr O’Connell said that more investment was needed to tackle a rise in population.
“We haven’t been investing in infrastructure for a long time to cater for the level of population growth. There’s no point in saying that our population projection from 2018, from the original National Planning Framework was written, that that is sufficient for where we are at now in terms of population growth,” he said.
“It needs to be reviewed urgently,” he added.
Article Source – IHBA does not believe home completions will increase this year – RTE
