The construction of up to 5,000 social and affordable homes has effectively stalled because of a row over Government funding.
Several Approved Housing Bodies (AHBs) confirmed they had been forced to halt work on projects in Dublin and elsewhere because the Department of Housing has refused to sign off on funding for cost-rental schemes since last August and for social housing schemes since last October.
While some projects have been given the go-ahead in recent days, others remain in limbo, sources said. A contractor working on a scheme in Dublin plans to pull workers off site next Friday because of a lack of funds.
The delays are expected to result in a slowdown in supply from the AHB sector, which delivered close to half of all new social homes in 2023.
Normally approval for funding takes six to eight weeks “but [until Friday] we’ve had no approvals for cost-rentals since last August...and no social approvals since last October”, one senior source said.
While delivery this year would not be impacted “the stuff we have in the pipeline [for 2026 and 2027] that we said we could achieve, we now won’t achieve because those projects haven’t started on site,” they said.
Two other Approved Housing Bodies contacted by The Irish Times said they had experienced similar problems.
The delay in approvals for new build cost-rental units under the State’s cost rental equity loan (CREL) scheme and new build social housing units under the capital advance leasing facility (CALF) appears to stem from a row over funding between the Department of Housing, the Department of Finance and the Department of Public Expenditure.
The Department of Housing is understood to have overshot its budget last year for several reasons including the higher-than-anticipated cost of cost-rental projects and a bigger allocation to the Land Development Agency (LDA). The funding delays were also said to have been compounded by the change in government.
In an attempt to fix the logjam the Government last month announced an additional €450 million to fund the delivery of some 3,000 affordable and social homes.
A spokesman said the Department of Housing was “committed to assessing and approving housing projects as quickly as possible”.
“The number of proposals for new housing projects in which the department is involved changes on a daily basis as new proposals arrive and are approved, or as factors change with existing proposals,” he said.
The additional capital funding of €450 million in 2025 “will allow for the approval of projects which will deliver 3,000 social, affordable and cost-rental homes in the period 2025-2027”, he said.
Sinn Féin housing spokesman Eoin Ó Broin has, however, written to the Minister for Housing James Browne, expressing concern “at the ongoing delay in approval and funding for a significant number of social and affordable homes by local authorities and Approved Housing Bodies”.
“My understanding is that projects from AHBs and local authorities totalling more than 5,000 social and affordable homes were stalled awaiting approval from your department at the end of 2024,” he said.
“Of these 3,000 have now received approval following the Cabinet decision of a fortnight ago,” he said. However he said it was not clear how many of these 3,000 units will be delivered in 2025 or how much of the €450 million approved by Cabinet is for the 2025 delivery.
