The launch of Sinn Féin’s housing policy in the Republic has drawn some critical comparisons with the party’s performance north of the Border.
When Stormont was restored in 2020, Sinn Féin chose the housing portfolio and subsequently announced it had a plan to build 100,000 social and affordable homes over 15 years, equivalent to 6,700 a year. Social housing starts have since averaged 700 a year and could be as low as 400 this year, due to a budget cut from Sinn Féin’s Finance Minister, although the DUP is now in charge of housing. Total house building, public and private, is just more than 5,000 a year, half the region’s need.
Plans would always have taken time to ramp up, however, and most of the period since 2020 was disrupted by the pandemic and a collapse of devolution.
Some Sinn Féin representatives have offered less plausible excuses, including mandatory coalition and lack of tax-raising powers. Stormont has extensive powers to tax property, while any Sinn Féin-led government in Dublin would presumably also be a coalition.
North-South comparisons tend to assume Sinn Féin should be criticised for having different policies either side of the Border. In reality, different policies are usually appropriate. It is progress when Sinn Féin acts accordingly, and there is a danger of that being reversed if the party is spooked into putting republican ideology before practical delivery.
Housing definitely requires different approaches. The Republic has a budget surplus that can be directed towards social and affordable housing construction, the centrepiece of Sinn Féin’s plan.
Stormont has no surplus, so Sinn Féin has welcomed private finance, making borrowing easier for the housing associations that build nearly all Northern Ireland’s social homes. Banks and insurers have quickly seized the lending opportunity. Although it would be more accurate to say Sinn Féin waved through long-standing proposals on borrowing rather than initiated them, it did not block them on ideological grounds.
In the Republic, Sinn Féin wants student accommodation built by universities instead of “vulture funds”. In Belfast, where Sinn Féin is the largest party, it has rolled out the red carpet for private student accommodation. Sinn Féin is also happy to approve built-to-rent apartments in Belfast – the best model for large residential buildings – despite opposing them in Dublin. Central Belfast has been almost completely depopulated since the outbreak of the Troubles, so there is a unique argument to develop it by any means available. Sinn Féin supports Northern Ireland’s housing co-ownership scheme but wants to abolish equivalent shared equity schemes in the Republic. These schemes subsidise demand, which is clearly absurd. However, Stormont funds co-ownership from a part of its budget that is otherwise extremely difficult to spend, so Sinn Féin’s inconsistency is not quite as absurd as it seems.
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Northern Ireland is finally adopting developer quotas for social and affordable homes, 13 years after acquiring the power to do so and decades after the rest of the UK and Ireland. Belfast City Council is pioneering the policy with a quota of 20 per cent. Sinn Féin wants the same quota in the Republic raised from 20 to 30 per cent, taking a two-speed approach to the policy.
All house building in Northern Ireland has hit the constraint of an overloaded sewage system, described by the construction industry as its most serious problem. Planning approvals are stalled in Belfast and most big towns. Sinn Féin is primarily responsible, having failed to adequately fund NI Water, the Stormont-owned water company, since taking charge of it in 2007. The party has done so with one eye on the Republic, fearing criticism if it suggests any form of domestic water charge. This is part of a broader populist refusal to raise revenue or reform public services and bring costs under control. So Sinn Féin has come up with a populist alternative – developers should pay instead.
The numbers for this add up. If Northern Ireland was building all the housing it required, as it managed to do before the 2008 crash, NI Water’s additional long-term funding need would add £15,000 to the cost of a new house. This is barely more than prices have risen in the past two years, thanks in large part to shortages caused by the overloaded sewage system. House-buyers might as well pay the extra and have houses to buy.
Work on this has been going on behind the scenes. Developers can already be charged for sewage connections and provide additional drainage and treatment facilities but NI Water has advised it needs legislative changes to use a general levy effectively.
Sinn Féin’s different approaches to housing are intriguing and evolving. Ultimately, they are about securing power to advance a united Ireland, so it is somewhat perverse that there is so little interest, north or south, in policy details across the Border.