Eoghan Murphy (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

On the cost of construction report which is being drafted by my Department, part of that report managed to make its way out, incorrectly, into the public domain. I do not know whether that is one of the leaks that the Deputy referred to in his contribution yesterday evening. Work on that report is continuing. I had the chance to preview an early draft to see how it is progressing, but there is still a bit of work to be done, if I am being honest. It is not an easy thing to do, and obviously the Department has a number of pressures across a number of fronts.

I am not exactly sure when the other report will be available. I did discuss it very recently in my most recent meeting with the housing agency. We want to publish both reports together, and I do not want there to be delay on our side from having them both published. I would hope to have them in the course of October.

On the independent inspections, I am currently in a position where I am finalising budgets. We want to see more inspectors, and we need to have a budget to provide for those inspections. I am working on that. It will include more inspections in the private sector, which is important as well. We will have a protocol in place. There should be a reporting mechanism which reports to me, but there should also be a separate reporting mechanism which reports to the committee so that it can understand exactly what is coming from those inspections and what is showing. That is something that we are also progressing with the water services legislation, which is currently on Second Stage. We are working on that protocol at the moment with the DRHE, and we will have something on that shortly. The key thing is to get the money in place so that we can have the inspectors and the inspections.

On the land initiatives, I am meeting with Dublin City Council on Monday evening and it will no doubt raise this with me then. I look forward to seeing more details on this. If we can help in a meaningful way I would like us to help, but I will wait and see what the city council has to say to me directly.

On LIHAF, the local authorities met the 15 September deadline. The different contracts are at various stages and I have a number of them on my desk at the moment. I wanted to stress to the local authorities that they should not wait for me to sign off before proceeding to design stage. In 80% of cases that has happened. They are already at design stage, pending approval from me. To give a brief update, one of the 34 projects listed has fallen out. It was a smaller project and we were not able to proceed with that. I will give more details on that when I can. We are about to sign off on 20 of the contracts. I will be able to sign them quite quickly because I am happy with them all. In a few other cases we are having a second look to see if we are getting what we think we should be getting. It is at the sensitive stage of signing contracts so there is not too much I can say, but what I can say for certain is that about 70% of the housing that will be delivered by LIHAF will be two or three bedroom units costing €320,000 or less. At the moment we are trying to ensure that we can secure an affordable provision on site.