Alan Kelly (Tipperary North, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Cowen for his comprehensive list of questions. It is correct that 52% of the Vote is allocated to housing. That reflects the priority of Government, which I am sure he welcomes. We have an issue with the supply of housing because of the way that social housing was dealt with in the past 20 years. I am not blaming anybody. There was a failure to build sufficient social housing and this is now critical. There was a lack of activity for a number of years which caused a perfect storm and gave rise to issue which we now must now address.

We have had comprehensive discussions with local authorities. For the 1,400 built or acquired we sent out request calls to every local authority in the country. We got them back last week. We are doing the analysis now and will verify the exact numbers in the coming weeks. We are going through the list local authority by local authority. I was pleasantly surprised at the capability they have for new builds, which is a good sign. We will determine how that figure is broken down on the analysis of every single local authority. We are heat mapping this to prioritise areas particularly around Dublin and larger cities where we have a larger demand. I expect quite a number of these will be new builds. There are areas where it still makes more sense financially to acquire, which does influence one's decision - one is not hitting supply and if there is availability at a cheaper rate than it would cost to build it makes sense to purchase rather than build. There is a deep analysis going on in our Department, which has been ramped up for the purposes of doing this work.

A question was asked about leasing. It is a mixture. I believe there is a volume of them ready to go and we are happy with that. There are some areas where there are specific issues we isolated as part of this analysis. This is almost a pick and mix style. If we have problems in one area of build or buy because of the costs in purchasing in high demand areas, we can have other options regarding leasing.

I will turn to the question on local authority units.