The People Before Profit National Spokesperson, Richard Boyd Barrett TD said “The housing crisis in Ireland continues and will not be solved by repeating the same failed private market-based policies and actions that successive FF and FG governments have pursued.
We need tens of thousands of social and affordable homes built each year to cater for the many paying extortionate rents or stuck on housing lists year after year. The private building industry cannot build on the scale required. The two biggest building companies, Glenveagh and Cairns, only employ 300 people directly and build less than 2,500 homes a year. If more homes are built, prices fall and profits drop. So private builders have no incentive to build more homes and instead engage in excessive focus on office and hotel developments, or other developments that are more profitable for them than building homes.
The recent Housing Commission report recognised that ‘exceptional and radical measures to deliver a substantial amount of housing in the shortest time practicable’ are required. The establishment of a state construction company is one such exceptional and radical measure.
Only a new state construction company can achieve the size required to deliver the massive expansion of house building, retrofitting of older houses, and refurbishment of vacant homes we need. Funded with the Apple tax revenues, such a body can easily access the land, finance and labour that are needed at scale to directly build at least 35,000 social and affordable homes per year – homes that are urgently needed.
A state construction company will also be able to build homes at a much lower cost than the private sector by cutting out land acquisition costs, profit margin, VAT and reducing sales and marketing and finance costs. In total it is estimated that close to €200,000 can be eliminated from the cost of building a 3-bedroom home.”
Deputy Paul Murphy said “A state construction company will also allow us to address environmental impacts and carbon emissions through improved design standards. Traditional construction methods are a major source of carbon emissions and the state needs to be in a position to address that speedily and at scale.
The state construction company will have an urgent task to improve the pay and working conditions in the sector and it will need to dramatically increase the number of apprentices in the construction trade through highly proactive recruitment. Thousands have dropped out of their apprenticeships over the last three years due to extremely low pay in the first two years of apprenticeships. Their pay needs to be increased immediately to stem the flow out of apprenticeships and to enable rapid recruitment of large numbers of apprentices.
If the failed private market-based policies of successive governments continue, then so will the housing crisis. People Before Profit will not accept this. We are committed to establishing and rapidly ramping up a state construction company to clear the waiting lists and to end the scandal of homelessness”.