Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

We are responding to the increases in rent with an increase in HAP and rent supplement payments. The increase varies throughout the country depending on the extent of the rent increase. Obviously, it was much higher in Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Galway than it would have been in other rural areas.

Deputy Ellis asked about accommodation for older people. At the ploughing championships yesterday we launched a new competitive process in respect of which there is a prize fund of €100,000 available. We are inviting designers, architects, developers and so on to come up with an exemplar design solution for housing for older people, including people who want to trade down but live in a safe community setting. We are seeking house designs that specifically meet the needs of elderly people. We should be smart and sophisticated enough to do that. The purpose of the €100,000 prize fund is to get people competing on an ideas basis to provide solutions that we can factor into our pathfinder projects and social housing schemes. It is important that an element of our social housing schemes specifically target and cater for elderly people. This can also be done in private sector schemes because I believe there is a strong private sector demand for this type of housing. That is a priority for us.

A consistent thread throughout the plan is the competitive process to ensure we get the best ideas. We have a very sophisticated and streetwise house building and development sector in Ireland. There are many very good architects in this country. There are also many people who went abroad to survive commercially, who have learned an awful lot in the places they have been, such as London, Boston and the Middle East, and are now coming back and we want them to be competing for design solutions to some of the problems we are trying to address.

We are reviewing our approach to Traveller accommodation as a whole. I know this is an issue close to Deputy Ellis's heart because he has raised it with me on a number of occasions. I am seeking approval from the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform for a significant increase in funding next year for Traveller accommodation. In the next day or so we will be publishing the response to what happened almost a year ago, which resulted in the unbelievably tragic deaths of ten people. We have assessed fire safety at all the halting sites and specific Traveller accommodation throughout the country, and that assessment will be published. I assure the Deputy that Traveller accommodation is a strong focus of this report.

In terms of spend, I would not judge output by spend at this time of year because often local authorities spend money during the year, be that on upgrade of a halting site or the provision of additional accommodation, which they do not claim until towards the end of the year. Members will be aware that the vast majority of capital expenditure, the programmes for which we will probably discuss later, gets drawn down in the last three months of a year even though much of the work takes place earlier in the year. In 2016, the target was to have an additional 66 units at the end of June but only 16 were provided. This is typical of the annual cycle in that the majority of delivery happens in the last quarter of the year. I will come back to the Deputy on the detail in that regard if he wishes.

On State-owned lands, compulsory purchase orders and church-owned lands, we are casting the net pretty wide in this regard. State-owned land is not solely land owned by local authorities. For example, we sought and have received from CIE a report on what land it could make available at commercial value to local authorities or the Government for housing projects. CIE has some very strategic sites available. It is likewise in the case of port companies and so on. The spectrum of State-owned lands is much broader than one might think.

I encourage local authorities to use compulsory purchase orders in a targeted and progressive way but there are impediments in this regard. There are pretty strong property rights enshrined in the Constitution such that a property with nobody in it cannot be acquired if it is privately owned. There needs to be pretty strong criteria around dereliction and so on before that can happen.

The issue of vacant properties was mentioned in previous discussions and again today. We have given the Housing Agency €70 million to acquire up to 1,600 vacant properties, in respect of which it is making great progress. The agency has been offered more than 700 properties. It has already secured 22 and a series of acquisitions in the pipeline are being worked through.

The €70 million is essentially a start fund for that. Once they begin acquiring, they get rent from the properties involved and the fund starts to generate moneys that can be used to buy further properties and that is how the figure of 1,600 will be reached. Local authorities are also acquiring a considerable number of vacant properties. There is a great deal happening on vacant properties, through the Housing Agency, through local authorities and through new schemes that we are looking at, such as the repair and lease scheme. I say this in the event that members might think the sector is not being dealt with.

My final point relates to Part V. I am aware that some would like me to demand 20% rather than 10%. In truth, the 10% under Part V is a minimum requirement. I am of the view that there will be many private housing estates that will contain more than 10% social housing in the future. Developers will be doing deals with approved housing bodies and local authorities but we must have a red line that reflects the bare minimum in every housing estate. Commentators are making crude calculations that one would need to build X number of private houses to get Y number of social housing units at 10%. That misses the point. Let us consider one of the projects, namely, that at O'Devaney Gardens, where the proposal is for 50% private units, 30% social housing units and 20% affordable rental units. There will be lots of examples where we go away beyond the 10%. However, there is a basic requirement that the minimum required in respect of all private developments is 10%.