"The Latest Bonfire of Taxpayer’s Money, the Modular Homes for Ukrainians is not an outlier" -Tóibín
Speaking after the publication of the Comptroller and Auditor General report on the procurement of Modular Homes for Ukrainians, Aontú Leader and Meath West TD, Peadar Tóibín stated:
“The OPW rapid Build housing programme Ukrainian refugees has become the latest bonfire of tax payers’ money. The Government set out to build modular homes at €200,000 a unit and ended up paying nearly half a million euros a unit. This is breath taking even by the this Government’s ATM standards. The taxpayer is now on the hook for €290m.
These temporary modular homes are significantly more expensive than permanent local authority homes. They have a projected life span of 60 years and are less than half the size of the a less expensive local authority home. The total cost of building a council house is now €318,365 nationally where the state owns the land.
Even if you contrast the cost of a new build in Dublin with these modular homes, the level of government waste is stark. A 114 sq metre house in the Greater Dublin Area is costing €461,000 to build and that includes the purchase of land. This is over twice the size of the reported 45 sq modular homes that are being built in Co Laois. The report states “The cost per square metre of the rapid build housing was estimated to be 87% higher than the equivalent cost in the SCSI report”.
Incredibly there are numerous examples of modular homes on sale online for less than €100,000.
The report by the Comptroller and Auditor General stated that the OPW did not carry out a strategic assessment report or business case reports as required by the Code of Projects costing over €100m. Neither were independent external assessments carried out. In other words the Department did not carry out an evaluation of the benefit, the cost and risks of these projects and did not compare them the alternative options. This is quite shocking and the Minister must be held to account for this.
The OPW did carry out a comparison with Social housing builds. But the report of the Comptroller and Auditor General stated that this comparison is not clear in terms of area, layout, facilities, etc.
There are serious questions to be asked in terms of the many payments were made to contractors. The report of the Comptroller and Auditor General stated that “under the NEC4 Option E contract, the contractor is reimbursed for the costs incurred in carrying out the works, plus an additional fee for overheads and profit”. When the state guarantees costs they do not incentivise efficiencies. Also if profit is a percentage of costs, the state is actively incentivising a mushrooming of costs.
This bonfire of taxpayer’s money is not an outlier. It is the latest in a long list of monumental government waste. The common denominator is the lack of government account. No one is ever held to account. The usual trite cliches of lessons being learned will be issued by the government. But if this government remains an accountability free zone we will be cursed to wake up to endless reports
