Brian Stanley calls for standardised house plans to speed delivery

First I just welcome Ms Leach and Mr Taff and for the present for your open statement. Obviously delivery is key and there's some questions I have around this and you set out that we need a 50% increase in annual output and that's just to meet the government targets. Some of us would argue that the government targets even need to go further but we're not going to dwell on that for now. And speeding up delivery is what I want to talk to about. One of the issues that I've raised consistently with the department and with the Secretary General is Graham Dial and some of the officials is the reuse of the same plans. Now I'm not arguing that we go back to 1930s style housing or 1950s style housing right but if you look at you know if you want anybody to ever produce anything you know whether it's a carpenter or whether it's a welder or whoever it is anybody who ever produced anything if you want to produce a lot of something. I want to produce it most efficiently at the cheapest price and get the best quality right and do it in an efficient swift manner is mass production right. I haven't met anybody who wants an affordable or social house or a cost rental who would object to living in the same house in Wexford as the people in Donegal or County Leash where I live right. So now the department they give a bit of spoof on this I believe that when they're questioned about this and they have been questioned about here as the Chair of the Public Council Committee I and others questioned about it that you know that they use that they have standards but standards what I'm talking about is the same plan the same plan there's brilliant examples I'm sure every TD here can and can show examples of good housing so you need one two and three bedroom houses in some areas you're correct you need different type housing you need high density low density depending on whether it's you know out in out in Blackwater or whether it's in Wexford town or whether it's in Dublin I was actually in Wexford in Blackwater on Sunday by the way it's a bit windy but it's nice but the the you know and you will need houses for disabled people and you need houses for the elderly but there's about reckon there's been eight and ten designs needed don't go to let the apartments take care of themselves for now but houses right and you know is it the case that you're being allowed that's the first question you have are is it the case that we're handling new plans because other county managers have told me that the cost of architectural designs is running up to 15 percent which is lunacy right along with slowing things down and shuffling pieces of paper between yourselves and the customs house which is more lunacy right should have a standardized design building and even with the affordables you can always change what the porch looks like you put a different face face on one of them you know one of them can be plaster finished one can have more brick or whatever you can treat them around to make them look different karen's homes and all them are doing it they're doing it right so look authority should be able to do it and just architects costs if you just maybe just say a few words on that the the the uh procurement you're using uh and welcome that uh increase your use in design and build so at local authorities design and build uh procurement process has been used um and just in terms of the cost rentals right there's a huge gap out there and your housing officials will tell you this you know there's a whole range of people coming in who are going to be very very elderly living in very very expensive private rental accommodation up to i think it's two thousand seven or eight hundred in south dublin at the moment you know average rents the rents are skyrocketing uh rent pressure zones are not working so we need cost rentals for those people you know homes that are built not for profit but where the finances can happen over a period of 35 or so years to cover the cost of construction and maintenance which is a model that some of us championed here back 10 years ago when nobody wanted to hear about it um that's just if you give a view on that the the other one i wanted to ask you about watching the time the other one to ask you about is is over the shop ones right been a lot of talk about this right and i want to say something you know it could be a bit controversial to yourself miss leach that a lot of those streetscapes and you can think of towns around the country right you drive through them uh you know if you went about modernizing some of them that fall down in a pile of dust right um they're they're costly to they're costly to do right uh very very difficult very very difficult to get fire certs you know and to reach fire standards because a lot of them are three-story buildings um and the other thing is you wind up with apartments in it separated by timber floors right and huge maintenance costs and what i'm suggesting is which has been done in some areas in some cases would not make more sense to hit them with a the back bucket of a jcb and load them into a skip right and put little streets because a lot a lot of them have long gardens a lot of them had an acre plus gardens running down to a wall garden at the back and in some cases there's going to be some good examples where that has been put in not to gouge holes in the streetscape right but you know we need to stop worrying maybe a bit too much about cosmetics too right and actually put in small small streets of houses where you get in maybe six or eight or ten and you actually get people living not half a mile out the road but in the center of the village which is what and town which is what we're supposed to be doing right just what's your view on that and the last question i have is about staffing in local authorities i was a member of local authority for a number of years and one of the big changes that i noticed is local authorities have gone away from core functions right you can rattle them all off water taxis you know etc etc etc and they're being diverted into arts and community and the department what i'm being told is they will approve and have approved legions of people in local local authorities in those departments and those sections right but try and get somebody approved for housing staff it's more difficult what's the situation with that and what's your view on it you know do you feel that local authorities need to get back to core functions back to basics right water sewage housing public lights footpaths roads libraries fair services the things that matter to people right and that's not against arts by the way i'm just saying that you know and community you know it's nice if it's nice but you know it's just one of those things like it's a bit like going out on a saturday night if you can you know you don't necessarily have to it's nice to go in that time arts it's the same you know uh but um what's your view on that just before you start mr just just just to be conscious that the the seven minutes is up but it's i'm going to give you time to answer it but just um if you give me two words what we need to fall get god i'll be happy i've been fair i mean very fair i know um seven is up so yeah thanks mr tan thanks and deputy san you're always welcome in wexford um on the reuse of the same plans yes the standard plans are now in place from the department for all the housing typologies so they've been published they're available and local authorities are starting to use them i suppose where the issue comes about is you have to sometimes tailor those layouts to the particular site and that does take a bit of time but it's not about redoing them it's about tailoring them so that has and is working and has speed is exactly the same yeah outside and inside yeah right so that's that's donuts in place but you still have to tailor them to meet it on architects costs yes costs have gone up on everything consultants uh costs have gone up in fact in some cases we're lucky to get architectural firms or engineering firms to even tender for the work let alone come in as a reasonable cost that's that's how tight tight things are at the moment we have gone out for tenders for example for some projects and we've got no tenders back for the percentage of overall class it wouldn't be 15 for example what we do in wexford is we design the architectural element of it in-house and then we might go out for later phases of us we don't we don't outsource at all we do some of it in-house with our own teams but you could be talking if you went if you outsourced everything for engineers quantity surveyors all that tender documents you could be talking 12 to 15 percent depending on the project on cost rentals for older people um actually um this morning uh myself and elaine were sitting on a a group looking at um how housing policy for older people which will form part of the new plan and the policy around cost rental for older people as they retire and as their their their income takes a significant reduction that has been looked at in that plan as to how that's going to be dealt with on so i don't know um what policy will be in on that but i know it's certainly going to be part of that on over the shop i think absolutely correct some of these properties are realistically just not fit for refurbishment and in some cases should be demolished and should be converted maybe amalgamated and put into a what we call an infill development or a backyard development where we allow um more new houses to be built on that spot and that is happening we probably need to do more of it but the issue is for us is that if you were to do say social housing in that by the time you've bought the site demolished the houses and built the four houses you have a very expensive scheme but that's not to say it's not the right thing to do because we have to repopulate our town centers and it's about doing a mix of that as well as the greenfield development and local authorities are starting to do that but again it comes back to the issue we need more staff to do that because that takes more staff input to do schemes like that but it is the right thing to do and that will be factored into our request for new staff on the staffing in in general in in local authorities and yes we do need more and i agree completely about core functions um we we see in the ccma that that the delivery of social housing and affordable housing is our core function and we want to do that we have been doing as it scale up to now we need to ramp up and do more of that and it's about getting the resources in to do that so what we do is we have a mixture of architects engineers and quantitative surveyors in our housing team most local authorities do so we've all the skill sets in-house we do all our design work in-house and then we use design and build or development under license to do that so what we're really good at is designing houses we design houses our architects know the locals in the area they know the counselors in the area they know what to look out for when they're designing things and what will get through the part date process and the public consultation process and so we we absolutely want to be resourced to do that and to do more of it and to do more of like the schemes you've said about you know infill development smaller infill developments that take more resources we want to do more than that but we need the resources to do it and we'll factor that into our at the work we're doing with the department on our ask for more resources and for more staff and for getting the architects the engineers the quantity surveyors to do that