Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the local authority officials for coming in. I appreciate how busy they all are.

My questions are different. Many of us are trying to tease through with the Department, whose officials will appear tomorrow, how we can fix some of the difficulties in the system to increase or speed up the output or remove logjams that many of us believe are in the way of the delivery of houses.

My questions are related to that rather than the individual programmes, if that is okay. First, the new housing need assessment figures have been released and show a drop of approximately 14,000 households on the list last year. The increase in HAP tenancies during that same period of time was 14,000, unsurprisingly. I know not everyone who has come off the individual housing lists has gone on to HAP. Some have gone into council tenancies, while some have come off the list, but it shows that at the net level of real social housing need we are not reducing that figure in any meaningful way. My concern is with the overall figures. I talk about real social housing need as including families on HAP and RAS, as they are in short-term insecure tenancies, and on the latest figures there are approximately 130,000 households. If one looks at the Rebuilding Ireland targets up to 2021, in terms of the real social housing with everything private sector stripped out, there are only 43,000 additions to the social housing stock owned by approved housing bodies and local authorities. I am trying to understand whether it is the Department not allowing the targets to move beyond what I consider to be the low-levels they are at currently or whether there are other constraints that are preventing local authorities. In my local authority in south Dublin, there is a list of approximately 5,800. When RAS and HAP are added there is a real need of approximately 9,700 but the local authority and approved housing bodies will provide only 2,500 units over the coming years. What are the constraints on local authorities having a target of increasing the real social housing stock to make it more in line with the level of real need out there?

Second, there is the thorny question of the cost of the delivery of real social housing units, and I know every scheme is different with different factors. The problem is that I received answers from the Department to parliamentary questions a month or two ago which stated the average all-in developmental cost for real social housing was approximately €200,000. A couple of weeks later, as part of our budgetary scrutiny, the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform gave us figures of approximately €216,000, even though it is meant to be working off the same developments. I received reconciled figures from last yea on the Part V units, and particularly in Dublin a significant gap is opening up between local authority or approved housing body costs and the cost of the part fives, up to €240,000, €260,000 or €280,000.

There is also the media reportage, which I am not sure is accurate or not, about the unit costs for St. Teresa's Gardens. I do not know if that is the unit cost or if there are other costs like site contamination works and so on. Will the witnesses give a sense of where we are on the output cost for what I would call real social housing units, owned by local authorities and approved housing bodies?

My other question ties in with the Professor Norris's and Dr. Hayden's report. The approval process frustrates all of us, and I am sure it frustrates all the folks in the councils. How can we shorten it? The Part VIII units are now down to 14 weeks, or whatever it is in statute. The construction is the construction but the approval, tendering and procurement still take 18 or 24 months, or longer. The Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government is on record saying yesterday on the radio that it cannot be shortened. Surely it can be shortened at the approval end. Is there not a way to use more local authority or regionally shared service framework agreements for social housing builds, in the same way that is done for maintenance contractors? That would be a way to avoid having to go out to tender for every single job. Is there a way of doing that? Would there be an upper limit to what the framework agreement would allow companies on the shelf and so on?

On multi-annual funding, it would make eminent sense to say to the local authorities that if their target is X over four years, there is the envelope of funding. Would that make a real difference and, if so, how would it work?

I know Mr. Tony Flynn is in the newspaper today talking about the value-for-money analysis of any projects costing more than €20 million. Will Mr. Kenny talk us through the practicalities of that? Is it necessary and how much of it is an impediment to delivery? Should we make a case here that there are better scrutiny mechanisms for the funding, rather than having that?

We are all talking about affordability. We are talking about cost-rental, affordable purchase and various models. I know there have been significant breakthroughs in Dublin city and I commend the work on St. Michael's estate. Notwithstanding the criticism of some politicians, it is an innovative project which this committee should support. Could we get an update on that? I presume the recent political antics will have no impact on Dublin City Council, DCC, ploughing ahead with that, as its elected members want. In the case of the other local authorities, however, am I wrong in thinking there is a frustration that central Government is still not coming up with a clear affordable housing scheme for cost-rental or affordable sale? Is that an impediment to the councils? The €25 million allocated in budget 2018 for Ó Cualann-type developments to offset the costs by approximately 75%, which then became €75 million, is still unavailable to the council, as far as I understand. Is that the case, and is the council part of the discussions about that? What do the witnesses think we, as a committee, should argue with the Department in the run-up to the budget to try to get the affordable bit, or whatever model is considered appropriate, up and running? On the basis of what I see, St. Michael's may be the first one but it will be several years before any of those units is available to rent, which seems a real problem. I do not blame the council - it is a departmental issue - but I would like to hear the witnesses' thoughts on it.