Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 8 March 2018

Public Accounts Committee

Vote 34: Housing, Planning, Community and Local Government

9:00 am

Mr. John McCarthy:

Yes. They are either owned by the relevant local authority or, in the case of some 70 sites, owned by the Housing Agency. The intention is to nail down the target setting process because there is no point in having part of the target delivery being reliant on direct build when access to land is a problem. We are trying to match those up. In some places it is quite a different picture. Some local authority areas have very decent landbanks in the right locations and other areas do not. In some cases, where local authorities do not have land where they want it, they have partnered with private developers who have planning permission to build but have not been able to access finance. We have put those together to get social housing built through the public funding programme that is available. We have a delivery team in place in the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government, which visits all the local authorities to go through all these issues. I believe the team has been to 22 of the 31 local authorities at this stage. I am not sure if Meath is one of those.

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