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

I thank the Deputy for his questions. Regarding the vacant homes strategy, the fact that the document has not been published does not mean that there is not a strategy. It is one of the first things that landed on my desk when I was appointed as Minister. This is no reflection on the people who put it together but I was not happy with the document. I wanted to get the teams up and running and rather than taking that piece of work and putting it out for public consumption, my direction to the officials was to get people into the unit in the Department, get them into the local authorities and for us to get a proper appreciation of what is this number actually. The desktop exercise that had been run at the time told us that the Central Statistics Office, CSO, figure was nowhere near what we thought we were talking about. I am not sure if the Deputy was here for the earlier engagement I had with Deputy Casey on this issue, but I will give some of the numbers again as they might be useful.

The strategy is in place. We have the unit in my Department and the local authorities are doing their work to identify the actual level of vacancy that might be there. I will give a few brief examples. If we consider South Dublin County Council, the CSO said there were just under 3,500 properties vacant and the geodirectory brought that down to 609. The local authority estimated a vacancy rate of 250. It went for a targeted pilot inspection and it found the real level of vacancy to be about 56. That is a huge drop. We are talking about a demand area, a property that is vacant and one that the council considers might actually be liveable. Each of the local authorities is experiencing that problem, namely, that the number we have is way off what we think it should be. One item of work we are doing involves the data analyst group working with the CSO to see if we can come to an agreed definition of what vacant actually means for the purposes of trying to get vacant homes back into use and then to see if we can do an analysis looking at a couple of areas to see what the true level might be.

People say that even if it is 10% of the CSO number, which would be 17,000 or 18,000 homes, it is worth pursuing, but it is nowhere near 10%. Is it thousands of homes? I am not so sure of that when we look at high demand areas. Obviously some local authorities in places like Donegal have identified vacant homes and they have gone to the banks and bought the homes or have pursued certain strategies because it has been useful for them to do so. However, in the high demand areas where we thought there was going to be this low-hanging fruit, I am not sure it is there. That said, the teams continue to do their work and to drill down. It will be a question for some local authorities as to how much time they spend trying to pursue a vacant home that could be brought back into use as against trying to get new homes built, but the work is being done. When we have a better idea of what the actual number is and what could be achievable from it, we will look to see how we will publish that and what work we would do off the back of that.

With respect to the introduction of a vacant property tax, that idea has not been dropped. The Minister for Finance, Deputy Paschal Donohoe, has set up a group to examine that issue to ascertain exactly how it might work. The difficulty is to know what we might be taxing. What the local authorities said to me in relation to this at a summit on Monday was that vacancy could be quite a fluid thing. Obviously we are not talking about properties between lettings or properties for sale, but a vacant property might be vacant only for a short period and by the time we get it on to the register, it might then back off the register. There are difficulties around this, and there is also a difficulty about taxing something when we do not know what it is and what is the amount. Both the work that the Minister, Deputy Donohoe, is doing and the work we are doing separately will go towards informing the potential for a vacant property tax, but it comes back to the point I made to Deputy Casey at the beginning of the meeting that vacant homes are not the low-hanging fruit that we thought they were. We have to build new homes and supply is key, but we also have to manage our existing stock efficiently. A huge amount has been done by local authorities regarding their own vacant stock but vacancy in the private sector is not what we thought it was even six or seven months ago.

In regard to the repair and leasing scheme and buy and renew properties, at the end of 2017, some 347 properties had been deemed suitable by local authorities under the repair and lease scheme, 226 properties were being inspected for suitability, 31 agreements to lease had been signed and only nine dwellings were operational. Obviously that is far below the targets that we set for ourselves. We are publishing today the changes that we have made to the repair and lease scheme, which were outlined at the housing summit to local authority chief executives under the buy and renew scheme, and I will get the Deputy that number in a moment.

In regard to exempted developments and how we will ensure compliance, there will always be unscrupulous people and we have seen that with landlords - we should not call them landlords, rather we should call them criminals. What we are trying to achieve with exempted developments is to bring back into use above shops units and we all know them in our towns villages and city centres. Exempted development is one aspect of this and we need to be clear on what is exempted and allow an efficiency in terms of timelines for the above shop units to be converted into a residential property.

Regrading all the different certifications they will need, work is currently being done by a group that is due to conclude very shortly as to what certifications will be needed and how they will be complied with. Obviously, traditionally, we are taking about buildings that are not new builds, so there will be different standards for different types of buildings, but we have to make sure that it is safe for them to be inhabited.