Government urged to use expected Budget surplus for 'social good'

Vivienne Clarke

Economic and social analyst with Social Justice Ireland, Colette Bennet has said it was important for the Government to use the anticipated Budget xurplus to provide “social good”.

Ms Bennet told RTÉ radio’s Morning Ireland that the Government should not “fritter away” the surplus.

“We have consistently called for these windfall taxes to be used for long term projects.

"So infrastructure, things like housing, particularly around social and real affordable housing and things like your education, things like your health care. Our systems are in crisis, between housing and health we have a real difficulty here.

“The money needs to be put into those areas so that we're using it well. These are long term things that are going to last. And so we're not advocating in any way that they will be frittered away, but that they're actually used to provide social good so that we have sustainable public transport.

“We've seen what happens when we don't have secure energy systems. We've seen it over the last year. And so we need to be investing in our renewable energy systems.

"We need to really start looking at offshore wind, and we need sustainable public transport in terms of our environmental goals. And we need to be looking at things around climate mitigation and investing in all of those areas as well.”

Ms Bennet also called for an investigation into the “capacity” issues in relation to social and affordable housing.

“When we look at capacity, we're obviously looking at labour. So we need to start looking beyond where we get our labour force from. Back in 2007, when we had the boomiest booms, we saw labour coming in from accession states and outside of the EU.

“So how do we make it easier for people to come to use their skills that they have and to build? But aside from that, we also need to look at how we procure in terms of housing.

"So making sure that we're using sustainable materials, that we're building to a particular standard, that those standards are set appropriately, that we're not getting into the kind of substandard that we had around the boom years.

"And that the money that is there is being used appropriately. We estimate that the need for social housing is about 133,000 homes. So that is a significant jump on what the government is targeting”.

Ms Bennet said that the Government target for social housing should be for 14,500 units to be built every year with a target of social housing reaching 20 percent of all housing stock by 2030, which would be in line with other European countries, she said.

“Of the 133,000 households that I mentioned earlier, a significant proportion of those are living in the rental sector at the moment, and they're being funded through HAP for part of their rent. So they would be moved into real, proper, appropriate social housing and that would free up rental spaces”.