Ms Valerie O'Sullivan:

I will try to describe in more detail the use of the EU competitive dialogue. There are key differences in the way a local authority can procure a housing programme now, as we did, for the construction and addition of new units to stock, and how we would have done that previously. We had to find a different way of doing it. The reason this particular European framework lent itself to doing it that way was because the city is running out of developable land; it is quite small. We no longer have stocks of landbanks. Those that are remaining we have plans for, and the demand did not meet what we had on the books. In simple terms, that allowed us to put out a call to landowners - the size of the land did not matter - and developers, regardless of whether they had land. The landowners did not have to be developers. It included approved housing bodies, AHBs, as well. It was a mechanism by which we could assess the capacity of the proposals that came forward either from individuals in those sectors or partnerships that were proposed among those sectors with Cork City Council.

The last step in the process is Part 8 planning permission, not the first step. The entire testing of capacity and the rigorous rules of procurement, as applied by a panel that was set up, will have been applied by the time we go in to try to secure Part 8 planning permission. We secured four of those on Monday night and another four are imminent. They will require a special meeting of the elected members to be held. They have started their summer recess but are willing to return and examine those in the interest of speeding up the starts on those sites. We are very happy to expand on that if the Deputy is interested. We are not saying this should be a model for other local authorities. We are saying it could be, particularly for urban local authorities challenged by the same availability of land issue as we might have been. We also believe it uncovered 31 sites in the first instance. Not all of those were viable developments, but we believe there is space, even within the so-called diminishing land within Cork city, for a second run at an EU competitive dialogue. It has been quite successful for us.

It was units produced mainly under that model which attracted the €97 million funding for Cork City Council that we secured in February this year. That is what allowed us to proceed.

In more general terms, I would agree with much of what has been said already, particularly about our capacity. If we are resourced, we will do it. Our track record speaks for itself.

Deputy Ó Broin commented on the level of need versus ambition. In my experience, the local authority has never been short of ambition, but we need to assess the level of need correctly because just as the number of vacant properties in Cork city is overstated, our empirical experience is that our level of need was overstated by 100%. We dropped people from the housing list who were not in need of housing by means of introducing choice-based letting, CBL, and going through the housing needs assessment. We can share the details of that with any member. Other local authorities are going through that same process as CBL is rolled out. The level of real or net need must be established and there has never been a shortage of ambition in local government.

With regard to the HAP inspections, there will be an issue in terms of resourcing those. Cork City Council will have to examine the option of outsourcing. We are fortunate in that the eight months inspection deadline per HAP property is only now coming upon us because we were quite late to HAP. At the same time, it has been very successful because we have just under 1,200 units in the HAP system now. Similar to what our colleagues in Fingal City Council said, HAP has proven an attractive option for many Cork applicants. They want to live in those addresses. They perceive private rented accommodation to be a viable housing option.

As for how the transfer list is working, transfers are not as much of a priority for us as the first provision of housing, but there are no HAP tenants banging on the door saying they want to get out of HAP properties. That has not been our experience in Cork.

With regard to acquisitions, we acquired well over 130 units in our acquisitions programme. We had to focus on that because it takes a long time for construction to get up and running. We acquired all those units off-market and our vacancy rate is 0.5%.

Deputy Ó Broin asked another question about the four-stage delivery process. I agree with the comments made by Dublin City Council. We would add to that by saying we have built excellent relationships in the Department and much depends on those excellent relationships because there remains a certain level of control and repetition. We, too, have planners, architects, quantity surveyors, engineers, property experts and so on but one wonders how many of those are needed to go over proposals. Undoubtedly, a level of oversight, centralisation and duplication is adding to the timelines between submission and approval.

In terms of the rapid build units, at the end of quarter 2 we submitted a proposal for 20 units. We believe "rapid build" is somewhat of a misnomer because they all still need to go through the procurement and planning process and so on. Once that process is complete they may well be capable of being built more rapidly but that misleads people.

In regard to Deputy Barry's question, there is no problem in providing a written response.