Owners of vacant homes to be targeted in housing plan

Owners of vacant houses and apartments may be granted money to refurbish them and to make them available for social housing, under plans being drawn up by the Department of Housing and Planning.

Minister for Housing Simon Coveney’s Housing Action Plan, due to be published on Tuesday, will also put forward plans to incentivise changing vacant commercial units into housing, as well as measures to speed up home sales and probate transactions to reduce how long properties are vacant between occupants.

Officials estimate that up to 20,000 vacant homes could be brought into use over the next three years.

The proposals are outlined in a draft of the housing plan, seen by The Irish Times, under the heading “better utilisation of stock”.

It says a proportion of funding for social housing should be reserved “to allow for the advancement of pilot projects . . . to incentivise private property owners to bring vacant properties into use for social housing purposes”.

The draft plan says department officials are examining proposals made by Carlow County Council and Waterford City and County Council "setting out potential funding mechanisms for the incentivisation of private property owners to make vacant units available for social housing use.

“The proposals include the use of existing contractual arrangements under the Social Housing Current Expenditure Scheme, as well as additional arrangements for the up-front funding of refurbishment costs by local authorities to be offset by the agreed payment and availability payments to be made to the private owners by the local authorities.”

The homes could then be sold, let or leased to local authorities “to increase the supply of social housing”.

Census figures

Dated the end of last month, the draft was written before the publication of last week’s Census 2016 figures showing there were 198,000 vacant homes across the State, not including 61,204 vacant holiday homes.

Representing 9.7 per cent of the total housing stock - about twice the rate that would be considered usual - housing and homelessness campaigners described the figures as “scandalous”.

Mr Coveney’s plan says a register of vacant homes will be compiled, to better understand their “where, why and how”.

“Improving transaction [including sales and probate] times may have immediate benefits in reducing the number of vacant properties and the length of time they are unoccupied.

“Examination of vacancies in high-demand areas, in towns and villages, and the development of responses to get homes back into use is needed . . . If 20,000 such properties were brought back into use over the next three years this would fulfil a full year’s demand.”

The plan also says a proposed urban regeneration scheme would include a review of planning legislation.

This would be “to explore the feasibility of allowing the change of use of vacant commercial units in urban areas - including vacant or underutilised areas over ground-floor premises - into residential units without having to go through the planning process”.

The scheme would also include tax incentives, the plan indicates.

The plan also commits to exploring ways to increase and promote the availability of “step-down” housing for older people, to enable them to move out of family homes into smaller units, “where appropriate”.