In the past fortnight, housing minister Eoghan Murphy launched the Rebuilding Ireland progress report and announced new programmes to help alleviate the housing shortage. There is occasionally positive news on the housing policy front.
The building of affordable houses on state land is a welcome development. With the right mechanisms in place, the state can deliver housing for households with annual incomes of up to €75,000. Neither should it threaten private builders who cater to a different market. This has the potential to alter the housing landscape in a positive fashion, although it does not look like any will be delivered in the near future.
The idea of a state-backed cost-rental programme, also discussed by Murphy last week, is another constructive step — although no replacement for home-ownership. He was vague on the details. The aim is that rent paid would cover the cost of building a home, plus its management and maintenance charges, but with little profit.
Also interesting is the minister’s decision to consider a ban on evictions when landlords want to sell properties. I am not sure this will gain acceptance with his party political colleagues. My suggestion would be for a ban on such evictions for landlords with three or more properties. In addition, tenants ought to be compensated should they have to leave a home that is being sold or repossessed by a landlord.
It is a pity these announcements were eclipsed by Murphy’s disclosure that he could not say how many houses were built last year. This was a politically courageous decision. He might have got away with it, but he made things worse by saying he would not rely on electricity connection numbers to indicate housing output, then included them in his ”progress report”. The report also contained other spurious housebuilding activity measures, such as the number of commencement notices, which are lodged when a house is due to be built, and the number of planning permissions granted. Neither is regarded as a measure of current or future housebuilding activity.
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The point here is not the numbers, but the use of misleading indicators. This is effectively spin. It is not new in the private sector, but has greater significance when it comes from trusted sources such as government departments. When the expectation of truth is higher, the sin of misleading is all the greater.
Good news gets lost when the suspect statistics become the headline. It is, however, important to challenge dodgy data and fake news. Typical fake news, which I see all too often in housing, involves factually inaccurate or ambiguous information. This is all with the object of obscuring reality.
There’s probably a short-term gain in muddying the waters about targets achieved and houses built, especially if repeated without analysis, but it is a waste of state-funded man-hours. At another level, there is significant reputational damage done when the misleading numbers are exposed. A housing department not being able to count houses is bad. Being caught out with misleading metrics is worse.
This is a pity because plenty of excellent plans are made. There are proposals before the government to require landlords to have to tell the Residential Tenancies Board when they serve a notice to terminate a lease. This is a positive step in supporting people at risk of homelessness. There are also good proposals to establish an online planning platform, eventually leading to the roll-out of e-planning, which would mean a more efficient process.
Unfortunately, these initiatives don’t get a look-in as the spin becomes the message and the good work gets ignored.