Council talks of more contractors for social housing maintenance – but should it hire more staff?

At a meeting of the South Central Area Committee a few days ago, Sinn Féin Councillor Daithí Doolan leafed through an update on planned maintenance in social housing.

He turned to the page on “key issues” that face Dublin City Council – the city’s biggest landlord – as it tries to move towards speedier and planned, rather than reactive, maintenance of its homes. 

The council has “significant procurement requirements”, the slides said, and “need to establish large number of framework agreements and panels to support the work of the [planned maintenance department]”.

In other words, to build up its pool of contractors to which it can assign maintenance work.

Doolan asked a bit more about that and challenges ramping up. “Is the challenge that it is not attractive enough financially for companies?” 

“Is the challenge that there is a glut of work in the private market, and that the city council’s contracts aren’t attractive enough?” he said.

Robert Buckle, a senior council engineer, said that they already have three main frameworks for housing maintenance. 

One covers “voids” (refurbishing vacant social homes, between tenancies), another for minor works is for reactive maintenance, and a third relates to mechanical ventilation. 

But officials would like to grow those, he said. 

“There is a desire in our department or within housing as a whole to widen and increase the number of frameworks that we have,” he said – to extend what they cover, and how long they last. 

There are issues with resourcing though, he said, within contracted companies. But, he said, there are also issues with resourcing of the council’s in-house teams. 

Buckle has been doing the rounds of the area committees, updating councillors on what planned maintenance – rather than reactive as has been the norm in recent times – is scheduled for this year across the city’s social housing complexes.

Works such as door upgrades in Mercer House, water pump upgrades at Bernard Curtis House and so on, across the city.

Several councillors for different areas sought to dig a bit more into, among many other questions, who would be carrying out the works – what is and should be outsourced, and what in-house, and what the direction of travel should be.

Anecdotally, reliance on contractors does seem to lead to issues with the quality of maintenance work, said Conor Reddy, a People Before Profit councillor, earlier this week.

He deals with about 20 requests for help with housing maintenance each week, he said, on the phone on Tuesday.

Tenants will tell Reddy that a contractor came in, but the job was only half done, and they then have to wait for a council worker to come out and finish it off, he said. 

Meanwhile, Niall Shanahan, a spokesperson for Fórsa, said his union would have serious concerns in the event that the additional planned maintenance works are outsourced. 

“Strong protections against outsourcing are part of the current public service pay agreement (2024-2026), consistent with other public sector pay agreements dating back to 2010,” he said. 

“All public service bodies are required to engage with unions and representative associations in the development of any service delivery plan and must consult prior to the outsourcing of any service,” said Shanahan.

“The current agreement (which expires at the end of June, after which a successor agreement will need to be negotiated) reaffirms the employer’s commitment to the use of direct labour ‘where consistent with efficient and effective public service delivery’,” he said.

Dublin City Council hasn’t responded to queries sent on Monday asking how many direct-labour staff the council has to carry out maintenance at the moment, and their roles. 

It didn’t respond to a query asking why it is looking to establish more framework agreements, rather than hire more staff as direct labour.

Who is doing the work?

Protests by tenants – and Dublin City Council’s move last November to increase their rents – has put renewed focus on the quality of maintenance, and poor conditions, in social homes.

It’s hard to find research comparing the quality and satisfaction with in-house maintenance of social homes at local authorities, versus contracted maintenance, for different works in Ireland.

Spokespeople for the Housing Agency, and for the Department of Housing, said that they had never commissioned any.

But greater use of in-house labour is something that councillors have asked for, said Reddy, the People Before Profit councillor. 

Rita Fagan, community development worker and housing activist, said she would much prefer that the council swing further towards in-house maintenance staff.

She remembers a time when she would ring in and log an issue and somebody would be out within a couple of days from the council to assess the work, she said. 

Nowadays, though, responses are so much slower. Somebody in her block put in a complaint about a broken window four years ago, which is yet to be fixed, she said. “They have a piece of wood on the window.”

Meanwhile, she has reported, three times, how the public landing lights in her block are on 24 hours a day. “There’s no need for them to be on 24 hours a day.”

Electricians probably just have to come out and adjust the timer, she said.

With bigger in-house teams, with more electricians, plumbers, carpenters, those kinds of jobs can get done faster then and there, she said. “Build up their teams there. Build up the depots that are left.”

At a meeting of the North West Area Committee on Tuesday, Reddy asked how the council decides whether to use contractors or direct labour on a job.

Both have different advantages, said Buckle. “There’s various pros and cons to both.”

Direct labour is good for smaller senior citizens complexes, he said, if they’re doing up three homes within the same blocks, for example, and they don’t have to get a skip and can just use a council wagon. 

His team generally leaves it to the area maintenance officers to decide which to use, whether contractors or direct labour, he said.

A spokesperson for Clúid Housing – the only approved housing body with an in-house team for maintenance works in its social homes – said it uses its own staff for day-to-day repairs, turnaround of vacant homes or voids, and specialist trade support.

In-house, it has 48 operators who manage four jobs each a day, they said.

It also uses contractors when it needs “specific skills or in geographic areas where it is more economical and effective”, they said. 

About 60 percent of its maintenance is done by staff, and 40 percent by contractors, they said.

A snapshot

Buckle’s presentations to council area committees in recent weeks have given a snapshot of who is doing the work to renovate “voids” – vacant social homes – right now, across the city.

There are 866 voids on the programme across the areas, show his figures.

Of those where works are currently underway, 243 are being done up by contractors and 74 are being done by council workers.

What’s the rationale for so much less direct labour than contractors? asked Reddy, at the meeting of the North West Area Committee.

Buckle said the figures were just a snapshot at a point in time. We’re still using both, he said.

At the South Central Area Committee meeting on 15 April, Buckle also talked about staffing challenges within the council. 

His own technical team – which coordinates repair and maintenance of the council’s roughly 29,000 social homes – is made up of eight staff members, he said. (The whole council has about 6,000 staff members.)

That’s six engineers, one building inspector, and one admin support.

And there’s lots of turnover of staff, he said. “Four engineers are after getting promoted and have gone and moved on in the last four months,” he said.

They get new people in and have to train them up again, he said. Buckle has been perhaps the once constant in recent years, he said.

Later by phone, Doolan, the Sinn Féin councillor, said he would guess a couple of issues are at play when it comes to whether the council beefs up its framework for contractors, or relies more on direct labour.

“I think it’s probably short-termism,” he said. Rather than have to employ people long-term, and pay wages, it’s easier to pay for a contractor, he said. 

But also, the council has had problems trying to recruit staff across the board, he said. 

Rates of pay are set in national-level agreements between the state and public-sector workers. 

Dublin council workers are paid the same as people employed in Limerick or Leitrim, said Doolan, despite higher living costs in the city. A lot of employment has to be cleared by the Department of Housing too, he said.

Reddy, the People Before Profit councillor, said similar. 

Managers may say it is difficult to hire direct labour, said Reddy, and that getting contractors in is a speedier way to respond right away to repair issues. 

But councillors have argued for the need to look, longer term, at the council’s capacity to do decent maintenance and value for money, he said. 

Promises and expectations

On Tuesday outside Bernard Curtis House, the blocks of council flats in Bluebell, Audrey Currivan said she had been waiting about six months for a new door. 

“It’s old and worn out from the rain,” she said.

Whether it’s contractors or council staff who call out, she said, she doesn’t really mind – she just wants the job to be done. “It’s all slow.”

With the recent rent increases though, she would expect better maintenance, she said. 

That was the pitch for Dublin City Council’s increase in social rents. That it is going to be able to better look after its tenants, and spend more on social housing maintenance. 

Said Green Party Councillor Michael Pidgeon at the November debate on rent increases: “There's a clear direct line between the low rents we charge and the low crappy levels of maintenance we provide.” 

Other councillors argued the changes will harm households already struggling to afford the basics.  

Social Democrats Councillor Jesslyn Henry read out a note from a constituent: “How many of you have no heat and live on a bag of potatoes, bread and eggs?”

The rent changes are expected to bring in €33.1 million more in a full year, and €24.8 million this year – because it kicked in this month.

Last November, council officials said that it would mean an increase in the overall spend on housing maintenance and upgrades – so both reactive and planned maintenance – from about €146.9mn last year to €165.8mn this year.  

Funding for social housing maintenance is drawn from different sources. It comes not only from social rents, but from central government grants, other council funds, and – historically – borrowing, depending on the kinds of works.

Borrowing, now though, has stopped. Last November, the council’s head of housing Mick Mulhern said that the council had to date borrowed €138 million to date for maintenance. 

It had cost €12 million to service that loan in 2025, he said. “So to get away from that is a financially prudent approach to take.”

Overall, though, comparing the spend on social housing maintenance in the agreed revenue and capital budgets for last year, and those agreed for this year, is tricky. 

The figures are sliced in different ways.

At the South East Area Committee, independent Councillor Pat Dunne asked Buckle how much more was to be spent on planned maintenance, specifically, as a result of budget increases.

“We had roughly around €7.4 million last year. We’re just over €15 million in 2026,” said Buckle.

Dublin City Council hasn’t yet responded to a query set on Thursday, asking what exactly is covered by those figures – as the figures in the capital programme for planned maintenance, when totted up across different initiatives, are larger. 

At area committee meetings, Buckle also indicated that more is likely to come directly from the Department of Housing for planned maintenance, in the coming years. 

More coming?

Among the moves that Buckle listed as planned works for this year were surveys of the conditions in several social housing blocks.

These ADDjust surveys, as they are called, are part of a reappraisal of the condition of social housing which has taken almost a decade to get underway.

In late 2017, a working group at the County and City Management Association (CCMA) – a network of the chief executives of councils – began to look at, among other issues, the condition of social housing and stock surveys. 

A few years later – after meetings with the Department of Housing – it submitted an outline of what was needed, in particular an IT system, for councils to effectively carry out and record conditions in social housing and to move from the current system of reactive maintenance to planned maintenance.

That IT system is now in place across councils, and all of them have been onboarded, a spokesperson for the Department of Housing said recently. 

Councils have started surveys. They are expected to inspect all of their social housing by the end of 2030, the spokesperson said.

At the Central Area Committee meeting on Tuesday, Buckle said that once these surveys are done, it should lead to extra funding from the central government for planned maintenance. 

The council’s plan is that once they have surveyed 85 percent of the homes in an area or complex, they will put in submissions to the department for money to solve underlying issues, he said.

They have word from the department that they will fund, gradually, works required, he said. 

“So if a property you go into requires four or five things to be done, they might give us funding for one thing in 2026, two things in 2027 and so forth, if that makes sense,” he said.

The idea is that rather than waiting for "voids" between tenancies to do significant works, the council in future could keep the homes in better nick, he said – leaving less to do when one tenant leaves to get a home into decent shape for a new tenant.