Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 25 January 2018

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government

Update on Rebuilding Ireland - Action Plan for Housing and Homelessness: Discussion

9:30 am

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

Regarding the housing summit, we will publish the targets quite quickly. I wrote to local authorities at the beginning of the year to ask them to provide information regarding projects under way, what is in the pipeline and the various things they were thinking of doing. We discussed that information as it was fed back in advance of the summit and at the summit to drill down into the numbers. Over the next two or three weeks we will meet with the housing teams of each local authority to agree their targets for 2018, how they are going to meet them and to look beyond 2018. However, the detail for 2018 is crucial to ensure, as the Senator mentioned, we drive that delivery. I hope to publish that at the beginning of March and then we will probably move to quarterly publishing of the figures, so everybody can see what is happening, or is meant to happen, in each local authority area. Through transparency, we will get the accountability on where we are falling down and what is not happening and, through that, we will get delivery.

I have set up a new project team, essentially for project management and under the remit of the Minister of State, Deputy English, in the Department. The team has visited eight local authorities in the past two weeks. We have hired new staff to work with that group. I also told local authorities at the housing summit that if they wish to hire new staff on the build side to help manage individual projects, they can charge that staff to the capital side of their budgets as well. More resources are being provided because much of what is needed now is that key project management. We will do it from the Department's side by working with the people in the local authorities to ensure we get delivery of sites. In the fourth quarter of 2017, when we really put people under pressure and got into the weeds with the local authorities, we were able to deliver a significant increase in the number of units, getting them in place before the end of the year and getting families into them before Christmas. That was welcome.

Regarding a potential role for NAMA, the heads of the legislation for Home Building Finance Ireland are due to be published shortly. Home Building Finance Ireland will sit alongside NAMA because it is using some of its expertise to get competitive finance to non-NAMA debtors around the country. Are there other potential roles for NAMA and some of the staff and their expertise? I believe that there are, particularly as we look ahead to the national planning framework and some of the things we wish to do. However, I made it very clear to local authorities last Monday that it is their responsibility to build new houses, get new schemes open and to work with housing bodies to bring about the delivery of social housing, which is ramping up quickly. We are not taking that responsibility away from them.

The Senator asked about sanctions.

I understand the motivation behind that. One could tell a local authority that if it does not meet its target, that it would be sanctioned by withholding money or whatever. The difficulty is that if the local authority misses its target and one imposes a financial sanction, there is a question as to whether it will further undermine its ability to meet its targets. On Monday, I told the local authority managers that if they had a target for their areas for 2018, they will have to plan for in excess of that target. If they are to be sure of meeting their targets, they must build in risk or a buffer, so that rather than falling 8% below their target, they could ensure the targets are met or exceeded. Rather than falling 8% below last year's target, they could ensure that this year, the target is met or exceeded on the build side. It is important that we do that.

Land is an incredibly important resource and potentially the most important we have. Members may not have had the opportunity to look at the land map on the Rebuilding Ireland website. One can click onto individual sites marked with a red house icon, and learn the site is serviced and its status with regard to readiness to build. We will bring other State land into that plan, rather than just local authority land which is owned and zoned for housing, because a key component of the national planning framework is to become involved in these strategic pieces of land, whether in Dublin or the north quays in Waterford, for instance, to ensure we can deliver it according to the existing needs and future populations. That is not only for housing needs but also commercial needs, including job creation, leisure amenities and so on.

Land debt continues to be an issue in certain areas. I have spoken to some of the housing bodies about what they might achieve on certain pieces of land if local authorities made them available to them. With debt over-hang on some pieces of land, that will not be possible and we are working on the matter.

I have met the housing bodies in advance of the housing summit, as I did with the previous summit. I regularly meet individual housing bodies about specific sites, but when I met them as a group, we discussed the issue of how, when we identify land for local authorities to build on - which we are doing and is one of the outcomes of this summit - that we also identify land that can be made available to housing bodies in order that they can have certainty about what they can do. At the housing summit, we renewed that commitment that local authorities and housing bodies are partners in how we get homes built and meet the needs of people through social housing.

The Ó Cualann model has driven much of my thinking about the affordable purchase scheme. I have met representatives from Ó Cualann several times and met them very recently to go through some issues in either the last week or December or the first week of January. We have published the income limits in the affordable purchase scheme that we are currently designing, which I want to bring to the committee to flesh out. They are €50,000 for an individual and €75,000 for a couple. We must now decide what other eligibility criteria might apply for applicants. I want to do this soon. The first schemes under the affordable purchase scheme will commence towards the end of the year so we have some time to do this but I want to ensure there are no delays on the local authority side. The sooner we can give them clarity the better.

The Senator also asked -----

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