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

I thank the Deputy. Later this afternoon I hope to publish the latest homelessness numbers. I have not had a chance to look properly at them and I want to do that before I publish them so I can have confidence in them, but what they will show is an increase in homeless families nationally but a decrease in homeless families in Dublin. I was in Limerick yesterday and met with the chief executive of the council there and they have a problem with homeless families in Limerick. They have a large number of homeless families there but, because of the new money I announced at the housing summit for hubs, they will be able to draw that down and they have given me an assurance that almost all of those families will be in either hubs or social housing homes before Christmas. One of the outcomes of the housing summit, apart from the list of outcomes that was published, was the renewed focus from the local authorities and the money that I was making available to tackle this. Much work will have to be done, including more work outside of Dublin than has been happening to date, but in one respect, because Dublin has had this problem for longer, there are many supports now in place that we can roll out more easily outside of Dublin that will help. Regarding when a person presents as homeless, we have people and teams in place that are there to try to understand exactly what the situation is and a huge amount of effort goes into prevention. Since Rebuilding Ireland came into effect, 1,000 families have been moved out of emergency accommodation but 500 have been prevented from entering it, so a huge amount does go into prevention work. That can only happen when one does a proper interview and understands exactly why the person has presented, then sees how one can best keep them from falling into emergency accommodation.

There are a couple of points to make about the social housing programme. One of the focuses we have under the national development plan that I published earlier in the week is our intention that 40% of growth in building and development over the next 20 years will be in already built-up areas, which would take advantage of infill sites. I had the opportunity over the summer to visit these types of sites in counties such as Carlow and Kildare where infill development is taking place, and some of the sites are quite impressive. I had to try to break ground on one of them and could not get the shovel into the ground. It was a bit embarrassing and Deputy Casey's colleague beside him had a good laugh at me at the time. Building would not be my forte. The other point is that we do not want to build massive social housing developments. We want a good mix. We have seen in Dún Laoghaire a very important project come forward through the councillors for a mix of social and affordable housing, which I think is the model that can be replicated elsewhere. I will announce more affordability measures next week on the builds side that will help. After the budget we will have another round of affordability for buyers, which I think will be helpful as well. When we have those, it means we can have more ambition around certain sites that are in public ownership and what can be delivered. Regarding the build programme, we are pushing more and more towards rapid. Dublin City Council has come with its first volumetric rapid build of about 600 units, which is important.

We have been doing work over the past number of months as to how we can shorten the four-stage process and lock in a guarantee of a certain number of months - and no longer than that - and we are very close to being able to finalise that process with officials. We have never refused a project on money grounds that has been requested of us by a local authority, and that is an important point to note.

I was with An Bord Pleanála a number of weeks ago. It has its own internal change management programme under way regarding how it uses technology and how it might better use it. I will ask An Bord Pleanála for any data it can give me and I can give those data to the committee to help it to understand exactly how the fast-track process is going. The figure I think I heard at the time was that it had 5,000 homes or units on its books going through that process. I will get more up-to-date information on that for the committee. I want to give the committee more data sets rather than publishing quarterly reports and the amount of time that goes into that, so we will definitely follow through on that.

Regarding vacancy-----