What are all the parties promising on housing?
The Week in Housing 22/11/24
As regular readers will be aware, over the last few weeks I’ve been reviewing the pre-election housing policy manifestos of some of the parties. For this week’s post, I’ve put together a table setting out the key policy differences. As can be seen from the table below, all of the opposition parties that feature in the below table are offering a very similar set of policies. What is also clear is that there are four main areas of difference between the main Government parties and the opposition:
FF and FG want to extend demand-side homeownership subsidies, the opposition want to abolish them
The opposition parties want to further reduce costs in the cost rental sector to deliver more affordable rents, the Government parties make no such proposals
The Social Democrats and Sinn Féin want to introduce measures to ensure Affordable Purchase housing remains affordable in perpetuity, the Government parties appear happy for these properties to be re-sold at private market prices
The opposition parties favour radical reform of the PRS to strengthen tenants’ rights, the Government parties are not proposing any further reform.
I hope readers will find the below table useful in making sense of the rather complex debate on housing policy in the run up to the big day.
Events & news
On the 26th of November the Housing Agency and the IAF are organising a seminar on Community Led Housing. The CSO have put together a very useful Housing Data Hub.
What I’m reading
The Irish Council for Social Housing have released their pre-election asks. The Social Democrats have released their full housing election manifesto. A new academic article on the National Spatial Planning and compact growth in Ireland.