Simon Coveney defends housing figures

Housing Minister Simon Coveney has again tried to defend his department’s housing completion figures which were significantly higher than figures from the Central Statistics Office.

Simon Coveney defends housing figures

Included in Mr Coveney’s new Rebuilding Ireland plan was a defence of his figures on housing completions. Mr Coveney denied that house building is lower than the official figures. He was responding to reports that only 7,500 units were built last year, which is lower than the Department of Housing statistics which estimates 15,000 were completed in 2016.

The minister hit out at commentators who used the publication of the Census figures to draw conclusions around discrepancies in new house completion statistics: “A deeper analysis of these transitions is required and would be very useful in forming good policy.”

He argued the number of units declared by householders as being constructed since 2011 amounts to 33,436 homes: “However, 114,112 Census responses did not include any answer to this question, and there was no response at all in relation to those units which were classified as vacant (although 2,180 of the 57,246 units where a reason for vacancy was recorded were noted as being new units for sale).”

Mr Coveney added: “Completions as measured by ESB connections, which has been the standard means since the 1970s for calculating new houses being connected to the electricity grid in advance of occupation between January 2011 and April 2016 totalled 55,240 homes”.

Mr Coveney said the housing stock is defined as the total number of permanent residential dwellings available for occupancy at the time of census enumeration. He added that changes in the level of the stock are a function of the number of units being added to as well as taken away from the housing stock, and the net change to the housing stock is not a measurement of the number of units built between two census waves.

The total number of private households enumerated between 2011 and 2016 grew by 48,081 to just over 1.7m, he said. This figure is larger than the numbers constructed since 2011 as it also includes homes which are now occupied but which were vacant back in 2011.

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