Plans to deep retrofit half a million homes in the Republic to help meet climate change goals by 2030 are unrealistic, the head of builders' lobby group the Construction Industry Federation (CIF), has said.
And he claims similar logistical issues could undermine the recently announced Housing for All programme target for 300,000 new homes by the end of that year.
Tom Parlon, director-general of the CIF, said the likelihood is that people will only get their homes retrofitted to make them more energy efficient when they are changing hands.
He noted that the work will generally require occupiers to leave their homes for a period. Doing that for an individual property is complex, Mr Parlon noted; doing it for entire streets, which would be a more efficient way of working, would be even more complex.
The Government's Climate Action Plan calls for the renovation of 500,000 homes across the State to meet a building energy rating of B2 by 2030. That amounts to almost 30 per cent of all residential accommodation in the State.
It also wants 400,000 heat pumps installed into existing buildings in that time as part of the effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from buildings.
Officials accept that delivering on the retrofit programme will require a new approach, and is working towards a one-stop shop that will streamline the process for homeowners and builders, with whole areas being done at the same time.
However, Mr Parlon remains sceptical.“Where will you get 400,000 people to agree and pay €100,000 apiece to do it?”
When builders were dealing with the pyrite issue, Mr Parlon said, it was a major logistical exercise, moving entire estates out of their homes, storing all their furniture and possessions offsite, and then putting it all back in place when the work was done.
And with pyrite, where the average cost was around €70,000 per affected property, he said the State agreed to bear all that cost. That was not envisaged under the retrofit programme, which was also considerably more ambitious in the number of properties targeted.
Workers
On the recently published Housing For All policy, Mr Parlon said there was a question of whether there were enough construction workers in the State to deliver 300,000 homes over the next nine and a bit years – especially given the competing demands of the retrofit programme.
It would require a more efficient system of work permits, the CIF director-general said, so that migratory labour from countries such as Mexico, the Philippines and South Africa could come in to work alongside returning Irish construction workers to deliver the projects.
Even then he said there were doubts about whether the necessary permissions for and servicing of sites with roads, water and waste-water supplies could be delivered. Mr Parlon said the current system of planning permissions was prone to logjams through judicial review, and there were also delays even at current levels of construction in getting sites service-ready for building.
He said the industry was likely to deliver 20,000 homes this year given the three-month shutdown of the sector.
