Hubert Fitzpatrick believes the sector can meet the challenge of building vital infrastructure and 60,000 homes a year only if it has certainty and funding
Catching up has become the story of successive governments since the financial crash but the National Planning Framework, under which all county development plans are drawn up, was described a couple of years ago as “the flawed bible on which our entire planning system and population growth targets are based”.
This is at the heart of the construction sector debate with Government. Too much focus, they say, is placed on the amount of land zoned for housing as though the only thing missing is a commitment by developers to get stuck in and build it. “I’m aware that Irish Water, for instance, can actually provide additional infrastructure,” he says, but that projects have been put back because of a shortage of funding, creating an environment where some of our members are actually transferring some of their resources to the UK where there is a credible pipeline of work available.
“We need a planning process that has much greater certainty at the end of the day and if we don’t resource each of the key players in the process, it will lead to continued uncertainty and longer time frames,” he says, adding that uncertainty over timelines is an inhibitor to potential new entrants in the Irish market.
“This has all added increased cost,” he says, “and standards have continued to increase in the residential sector. I mean the standard of a house or apartment today is far, far superior to what pertained six or seven years ago. But Fitzpatrick says the tax as currently envisaged is “an unfair tax in relation to quite a lot of zoned land that cannot be developed because the infrastructure isn’t in place and clearly that’s an issue that should be addressed by Government to bring back a bit of fairness and equity to it”.
Alongside attacks on institutional investors, Sinn Féin among others is suggesting that private sector housing incentives should be phased out. Again, Fitzpatrick says that would be a retrograde step. “Very often, parents look back at the industry in terms of the crash and they see what happened in terms of an industry as such collapsing and it has left a sour taste,” he concedes. “But I believe the current environment is a lot more sustainable than it was back in the early noughties. Lending practices, whether it be for buyers or for developers, there is a requirement for significant equity to ensure it is sustainable.
“We’ve had major reform of standards across the sector. We’ve the mandatory inspection and mandatory certification of buildings and the whole culture of compliance has been brought to a whole new level. I’m confident that the prospect of something happening like what happened before has been minimised.
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