Mr. John McCarthy:

I appreciate Senator Boyhan's positive comments on aspects of the delivery. He made a very important point regarding the importance of Rebuilding Ireland being owned at local level by the 31 local authorities and AHB partners they work with in many cases. We get much engagement from local authorities at times around us being seen to put more reporting burdens on them. We always try to strike a balance. There is a critical part of the ownership of Rebuilding Ireland, as I stated to Deputy Coppinger; in the second quarter we have committed to taking the outcome of the recently completed social housing needs assessment and developing targets, probably for the next three years, for each of the local authorities. That will give a very clear headline ambition for each of the authorities. It will be influenced by social housing needs assessment and, equally, the extent to which some local authorities have been quick out of the traps, with significant work in hand.

On the refugee issue, the particular action we committed to was establishing an operational subgroup between ourselves and the Department of Justice and Equality, in particular, as well as other agencies under the refugee protection task force. That has been established and there has been very good engagement from the local authority sector. I hope there is a smooth pathway ahead, once the refugees have been through the process with the Department of Justice and Equality to get them initially assessed and considered, as to where they will ultimately find their long-term home. The local authorities are certainly very much engaged with that. It is a very good example of different parts of the public system working in a very co-operative way.

Senator Murnane O'Connor spoke about the Housing Agency acquisitions, the housing assistance payment, HAP, and various other mechanisms, including the local authority build programme. Rebuilding Ireland is really designed to have multiple tracks of activity, partly in the early stages because building takes time to ramp up. We cannot have a plan with the idea that building takes time to ramp up while we wait for the solution; that is why we have other strands of activity around acquisitions, particularly strands of activity heavily reliant on vacant property. Mr. Walsh spoke earlier about the census figure of approximately 190,000 in this regard and we will hear more about it in the more detailed census stuff in the next few weeks. With regard to "early wins", that is why we are in the space of repair and leasing and buy and renew. It is so we can tap into an existing stock of accommodation that can be brought on-stream quickly while other strands of activity are building up.

Going back to what I said to Deputy Coppinger, the build programme has ramped up quite significantly over the past 12 months from an incredibly low space. There are 8,500 units in the pipeline, as we published in the quarterly update at the end of 2016. We are adding to that on a weekly basis. In Carlow, within the pipeline of build projects there are 13 schemes with over 120 units. We will publish this in the update at the end of the first quarter and in many local authorities there have been further projects added as we go on.

We have spoken about HAP before at the committee.

We are very conscious of the importance of ensuring that there is a proper understanding of HAP, both by landlords and tenants. As the Senator rightly points out, some people say that some HAP tenants are people who were formerly in receipt of rent supplement and that it is just a different scheme. However, there is a very important difference for those households in that they are now social housing tenants and are governed by differential rent. Unlike the rent supplement scheme, where they would come to a certain number of hours work a week, suddenly fall off a cliff and lose all of their support, in HAP their differential rent changes but they do not lose their social housing tenancy. That is a very important benefit of HAP compared with rent supplement.

Since 1 March, HAP has been rolled out in the final three Dublin authorities. There is now full national coverage for HAP. As part of that, we have put a new hap.iewebsite in place with a lot of information for both tenants and landlords in order to promote the scheme as best we possibly can. Our experience of the local authorities is that they have really played a hugely important part in making sure that the HAP scheme has rolled out very effectively in most areas, coupled with good local engagement between the rent supplement people in the Department of Social Protection and the local authority officials looking after HAP.

The Senator mentioned issues around scarcity of accommodation. That is a general issue. It is what Rebuilding Ireland is in overall terms designed to achieve in terms of getting housing supply back up to where it needs to be. Whatever about some supply issues that may arise in some locations, we had a target last year to get to 12,000 tenancies and we achieved that. We have a target this year for 15,000 tenancies and we are already more than 25% down that road with less than 25% of the year gone. There are problems and pressure points in terms of supply in some locations, but in overall terms, it is not constraining our level of activity under HAP at a national-----