Richard O'Donoghue: Call for Common Sense on Redress Repairs
Richard O'Donoghue challenges the practical operation of the redress scheme, warning that current grading and repair requirements are forcing impractical, costly works and longer displacement for homeowners. He highlights contractor shortages, rising costs and the need to resource technical agencies rather than force the Assembly into technical arbitration.
Richard O'Donoghue explains that some redress grades label roofs as sound while ordering full removal of back walls down to foundations. That approach can cause footpaths and floors to collapse, requires highly specialist work and leaves homeowners displaced for longer than necessary.
He points out that specialist contractors to carry out such intrusive repairs are largely unavailable domestically and are already occupied building houses. The arithmetic, he argues, favours dropping a house and rebuilding rather than piecemeal, high-cost interventions. He cites current spending pressures, noting "We are now spending about 317 euros on the Micah scheme alone."
O'Donoghue urges the Assembly to respect the role of established agencies and standards bodies and to resource them properly. He stresses that the Assembly is not a building standards agency, and calls for common sense in how schemes are applied and improved to deliver practical remediation for affected households.
Problem with repair grades
Richard O'Donoghue explains that some redress grades label roofs as sound while ordering full removal of back walls down to foundations. That approach can cause footpaths and floors to collapse, requires highly specialist work and leaves homeowners displaced for longer than necessary.
Contractor shortage and costs
He points out that specialist contractors to carry out such intrusive repairs are largely unavailable domestically and are already occupied building houses. The arithmetic, he argues, favours dropping a house and rebuilding rather than piecemeal, high-cost interventions. He cites current spending pressures, noting "We are now spending about 317 euros on the Micah scheme alone."
Legislation, agencies and common sense
O'Donoghue urges the Assembly to respect the role of established agencies and standards bodies and to resource them properly. He stresses that the Assembly is not a building standards agency, and calls for common sense in how schemes are applied and improved to deliver practical remediation for affected households.
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Transcript
In the base of the redress scheme and the different grades that people get to redress, there's an issue turning up at the moment for Pirate, the redress from the Pirate, you're on a different grade, so you might get a grade 1 to 4 or 5. One of the grades at the moment they're saying is that your roof is okay, but your back walls have to come out, and what they're looking for is for you to prop up the house, take out the walls, down to the foundation level, which means your footpaths collapse, which means your floors collapse, and it's specialised work, and when you work out the economics of it, specialist contractors to do that are not in this country, enough of them are not here at the moment, the ones who are here at the moment are only trying to build houses at the moment, so how do you expect specialised contractors, and the cost of doing this, and people will be out of their house longer, when the real thing to do is drop down the house, rebuild the house. We are now spending about 317 euros on the Micah scheme alone, and again, increasingly now we're working through specialist, standard-based approaches, we have agencies, and I'm not going to argue toing and froing in terms of the specifics, but we can't dilute it, we have legislation. That's enough, Deputy, just allow the answer, or not. I'm not going to arbitrate in terms of professional advice, in terms of expertise, in terms of how to operate various schemes, because everybody is coming in now with solutions to every single issue from a technical point of view, we have established agencies to deal with that, to deal with standards, to deal with the technical aspects, and the remediation of them. There's a limit to what, this is a legislative assembly, we're not the National Building Standards Agency in here either, and they have worked on them, we have to resource them, we have to improve them, and we have to appeal for common sense in terms of how people deal with issues.