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

I thank the Chair for her compliments in regard to the Department and the staff who do a huge amount of work. I think they have been engaging very positively with members of the committee even when I cannot do so. Sometimes we will have testy exchanges, which I understand, but, by and large, the committee and the Department work very well together. We are all trying to work to the same objectives. In regard to the performance indicators for local authorities, local authorities will have different needs, and different things they will need to do. Obviously, some are working much better than others, and that is very clear. It comes back to the exchange Deputy Cowen and I just had. Obviously, local authorities are coming from a very low base because of what happened previously in the economy and obviously many of them are not yet hitting the kind of targets that we want them to hit. I am not trying to give the impression that all is good with the local authorities in terms of this form of delivery. The purpose of the housing summit is how we actually implement Rebuilding Ireland and how we make sure that we can hit our targets and get this work done and publishing the targets for 2018 could be very useful in that context. The local authorities will have different requirements, depending on the demands they have. As we publish the targets, some will be using other streams more than others. Some will still use the acquisitions stream because they will not necessarily be competing with young couples and families as they will not be high demand areas. However, they will believe there are properties on their books that can achieve value for money and can be delivered as social housing. Some will do more through acquisitions, for example, than through build, but we want to make sure that what they are getting is new houses into the social housing stock that are secure tenancies for the tenants in them.

In regard to staff under the capital budget, I informed local authority managers of this on Monday, that they can book staff to that budget. The examples always given to me are that if they had just one more person to drive a particular project, which is a large scheme, they could get it done within the 59 weeks. We want to make sure that they can do that, and that will allow them to do so.

Under the affordable purchase scheme and the cost-rental model, we want local authorities to be more pro-active with their land, and tell us where they think that they can help us get above the ambitious targets we have set for ourselves and above the land we have already identified and the money that has already been put aside. This is a co-operative partnership. The Department works with the local authorities to get these things done. There was a wide-spread welcome for these new schemes. For example, a local authority might be engaging in a contract with a developer on a turnkey site and the developer has the capacity to build 50 but the local authority may only want 30. The affordable side now opens it up the idea of going for the whole site. That means it can sign the contract and the builder can start works, knowing what is going to happen.

The delivery office is a new unit, so it is not a question of when it meets. It is constantly working. The delivery unit is working with the local authorities and with the new staff. We also have the new land management group which the Minister of State, Deputy Damien English, is leading. I believe I said earlier that it has facilitated each local authority in the first two weeks of this year. That is about them identifying the kinds of snags referenced in regard to Irish Water and other problems, such as a site not progressing to the timelines. What are the issues? Is there an issue around the bond, the developer or around some enabling infrastructure? How do we untangle that quickly? Delivery is all about having people allocated to particular projects and sitting on them, and driving them home. That is a piece of work we know we need to do now.

In regard to the LIHAV contracts, almost all of those have been agreed but a few fell out. We had over-allowed in terms of the financial resources of €226 million, in the hope that we would get to €200 million. We are not too far off €200 million in terms of contracts-agreed. The first drawdowns began towards the end of last year. It was a very small amount but we only finalised some of the contracts into the fourth quarter of last year. Many of these are complex arrangements and involve a number of developers and a number of different pieces of land, so one cannot view them as readily as if one was working with one developer or one landowner. However, what we will see in the course of 2018 is a much larger drawdown now that 28 of the 34 contracts have been signed. That will happen. Any of the money that was not drawn down in the course of last year was put to better purposes in terms of reaching the targets we had for 2017.

The Chair asked a question on local authorities. Was she talking about Part 5? I was not quite sure.