Ms Bairbre Nic Aongusa:

I will respond to a number of the questions directed to the Department and will then ask my colleague, Ms Sarah Neary, to respond to Deputy Ó Broin's point on the approval process and the reason we have different roles for local authorities and the Department.

Deputy O'Dowd spoke about the lack of local authority build and skills in this regard. By way of background, as stated by Deputy Ó Broin, there had been little construction in the local authority sector for many years at the time the local housing strategy was launched. During the past 18 months we have been working intensively on rebuilding capacity, strengthening governance, streamlining our systems and procedures and ensuring we put in place the right people and resources to deal with our vastly increased workload.

As I said earlier, we now have the resources to enable us to visit local authorities, work through proposals with them and thus get projects through the approval process in a much more timely fashion. We have seen a noticeable pick-up in the throughput of projects through the approval process. That there are four stages in the process does not mean it is lengthy. Some of the stages can be quite short, depending on where the project is at. Ms Neary will elaborate further on that issue.

Deputy O'Dowd also mentioned an issue which was raised earlier with the Minister, namely, the percentage of housing waiting lists that will be tackled by the capital projects that have been approved for 2015-2017. From the outset we have told the local authorities that we will be monitoring spend on capital projects and reviewing it on an ongoing basis such that, for example, funding for projects that are not being proceeded can be moved to other projects and so on. The target set for the first phase of 2015-2017 is 22,882 units in respect of which, as set out by the Minister, €1.5 billion has been provided. The national average is 25% of the waiting list. As stated by the Minister, his ambition is to do more and, as such, this is only a first step.