Ms Sinéad Carr:

There are one or two other areas that were not picked up on and suggestions as to what could be improved and what could be made more efficient.

People have asked what our relationship with the Department is like. It is very good. I will give Aidan O'Reilly a plug on this. He has been excellent in helping us with removing blockages in the system. Can that be speeded up further? I think it can, although the Department may have a different view. The four-stage process has speeded things up and assisted in delivery, but it could be pulled back to a two-stage process. I say that because there is a development plan with guidelines for standards and density that must be complied with by local authorities. There are templates from the Department on unit costs and design and densities that can be tied in. That can be done and should be thrashed out at the early stages of designing an estate and an agreement reached. One then goes through Part VIII and knows what one has as a result of that. When the tender comes in, that is the construction price of the development. Local authorities cannot tell the cost until it is tendered out and it is at that stage local authorities could re-engage. That would help speed up the process.

There has been discussion around whether the Part VIII should be reduced, or whether special proposals could be brought in to get rid of Part VIII altogether. I do not agree with that. I think there is a significant role for community members.

Tipperary County Council is putting a lot of Part VIIIs through the system. Many of them are in the very early stages and have been addressed very well by members of the council. There is beginning to be a bit of a pushback from communities. It will take a bit of time to get buy-in from the community on the new schemes, but that needs to go through.

The other issue, from the point of view of a rural authority, relates to the tendering process. There are fewer people tendering for our product, maybe because of where we are.

Sometimes the regional frameworks do not necessarily work out in our favour. One might only have two individuals or contractors tendering for a particular proposal. I ask members to be mindful of that.

In terms of the query raised on voids and turnaround, we would probably treat them differently. If the work involved is under a certain amount we are able to turn around our dwellings pretty quickly and we can get tenants in. Where dwellings require more work, and where there is a significant delay, we consider the dwellings to be voids and there is always going to be a certain number of them every year. The funding from the Department assists us in speeding up the delivery on the output of those, so it is important.

We were asked what are the potential challenges coming down the road. It depends on what part of the county one is from, but one of the things we are coming up against at the moment is that when a contractor is on site there is a struggle with the lack of people with the right skill sets on the ground. The cost of blocklaying is increasing. It now costs between €1.50 and €2.50, depending on what part of the county one is from. Contractors are struggling to get blocklayers. There are probably some pinch points in the system which we must seek to address.

In terms of the HAP and RAS schemes, for my sins, I was in housing perhaps ten years ago and I am back in it again now. Back then we did not have a level of flexibility between the different streams to deliver housing. Having four or five delivery streams has been very useful, in particular in the current crisis, and that is to be welcomed. I am inclined to agree with what was said by Professor Norris and Dr. Hayden. Direct build by local authorities and other housing bodies is probably a more sustainable way to go, but there is a role to some degree for the HAP and RAS schemes as well because they do assist.

In response to Deputy Boyd Barrett's question on whether HAP numbers are increasing, the situation is very different in each county. Our HAP numbers are decreasing, but we still have a target of two per week from the Department but we are coming in at 11. That is an improvement compared to where we were three years ago when we probably had one of the highest rates of sign up to HAP tenancies. The number currently is approximately 460 whereas two years ago we had approximately 900. There has been a rebalancing in that regard