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

I do not have an opening statement as I was informed it would be of no value. It is good to get straight into questions and Deputy Casey asked a number. I am glad he raised the CSO figures because work has been ongoing in the Department for the past six or seven months on these. This is not to say the CSO vacancy figures of between 178,000 and 180,000 are wrong, rather that its definition of vacancy is not how we would define what is a liveable property in a high-demand area that would be worth bringing back into use. We have now set up vacancy teams in each local authority and that number has come down quite dramatically. Even if we got 10% back into use, it would amount to 17,000 or 18,000 homes, an enormous number, but the information we are getting from local authorities is that the number of vacant homes is nowhere near the CSO's figure. Our desktop exercise brought it down to some 90,000 homes in high-demand areas but we started to drill down and we brought it down to below 20,000. At the housing summit, Galway City started off with a CSO figure of 3,500 but the geodata figure took it down by over 1,000 and after taking out homes that were for sale, between lettings, not in high-demand areas or not desirable for social housing, the figure was less than 100. Fingal had a CSO figure of 4,944 but the geodirectory made it 3,000 while a desktop exercise, to look at the figures and establish the real level of liveable vacant homes, brought it down to 361 potentially vacant units. Of these, 74 were inspected and only 13 were identified as vacant, which would give a total of 60 out of an initial figure of almost 5,000. According to the CSO, Fingal had one of the lowest vacancy rates.

Fixing supply is the primary aim in solving our housing crisis, although we also need to manage existing stock. However, the existing stock may not be there in the levels we thought and we have to think about what that means for resources. Is it more efficient for a local authority to have three people on the ground trying to find out who owns a home, why it is vacant, whether they should CPO it or if they should go for a scheme? That takes time and perhaps these people should be involved in trying to get sites built on. South Dublin County Council's CSO figures showed 3,500 while the geodirectory took it down to 600 and the local authority estimated the vacancy rate at 250. After its own research, the council believes it is only 56. Vacancy is not the low-hanging fruit we thought it was. We should try to get these 56 vacant units back into use, of course, and we will do so, but it will be up to each local authority to balance its resources prudently in this regard.

One of the Deputy's questions was on the definition of a void. A lot of time was spent on this. Local authority vacancy was the low-hanging fruit but when we came out of the bailout in 2014 the Government began an ambitious programme to get local authority stock that had been vacant for a long time back into use. In that period, at least 8,000 homes were brought back into use. These vacant voids included some that were derelict and some in need of significant repair but they did not include homes where the entire estate was in need of regeneration, as that comes under our builds figure. We are not talking about simple turnover or homes where there are casual vacancies. They are homes that require a substantial amount of work and investment to get them back into use as social housing stock. If that money was not spent and the work not done, they would be lying empty now but that is what we count when we count voids. If we were to stipulate that a unit had to be vacant for a certain period of time, we would put a perverse incentive into the system and a local authority might be enticed to keep a property vacant for a period of time in order to avail of additional funding.